Thomas Moore > Quotes

“It is only through mystery and madness that the soul is revealed”
― Thomas Moore

“A soul mate is someone to whom we feel profoundly connected, as though the communication and communing that take place between us were not the product of intentional efforts, but rather a divine grace. This kind of relationship is so important to the soul that many have said there is nothing more precious in life.”
― Thomas Moore

“Education is not the piling on of learning, information, data, facts, skills, or abilities--that's training or instruction--but is rather a making visible what is hidden as a seed...
To be educated, a person doesn't have to know much or be informed, but he or she does have to have been exposed vulnerably to the transformative events of an engaged human life...
One of the greatest problems of our time is that many are schooled but few are educated.”
― Thomas Moore

“Earth has no sorrow that heaven cannot heal.”
― Thomas Moore

“The ordinary acts we practice every day at home are of more importance to the soul than their simplicity might suggest.”
― Thomas Moore

“Disappointments in love, even betrayals and losses, serve the soul at the very moment they seem in life to be tragedies. The soul is partly in time and partly in eternity. We might remember the part that resides in eternity when we feel despair over the part that is in life.”
― Thomas Moore, Care of the Soul: Guide for Cultivating Depth and Sacredne

“And the heart that is soonest awake to the flowers
Is always the first to be touched by the thorns.”
― Thomas Moore

“There's nothing half so sweet in life as love's young dream. ”
― Thomas Moore

“It may help us, in those times of trouble, to remember that love is not only about relationship, it is also an affair of the soul.”
― Thomas Moore, Care of the Soul: Guide for Cultivating Depth and Sacredne

“It's important to be heroic, ambitious, productive, efficient, creative, and progressive, but these qualities don't necessarily nurture soul. The soul has different concerns, of equal value: downtime for reflection, conversation, and reverie; beauty that is captivating and pleasuring; relatedness to the environs and to people; and any animal’s rhythm of rest and activity.”
― Thomas Moore

“A genuine odyssey is not about piling up experiences. It is a deeply felt, risky, unpredictable tour of the soul. ”
― Thomas Moore, Care of the Soul: A Guide for Cultivating Depth and Sacredness in Everyday Life

“An eternal question about children is, how should we educate them? Politicians and educators consider more school days in a year, more science and math, the use of computers and other technology in the classroom, more exams and tests, more certification for teachers, and less money for art. All of these responses come from the place where we want to make the child into the best adult possible, not in the ancient Greek sense of virtuous and wise, but in the sense of one who is an efficient part of the machinery of society. But on all these counts, soul is neglected.”
― Thomas Moore

“I have plenty of machinery around me; what I really need is a more enchanting world in which to live and work.”
― Thomas Moore, The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life

“I thought that the light-house looked lovely as hope,
That star on life's tremulous ocean.”
― Thomas Moore

“Though the last glimpse of Erin with sorrow I see,
Yet wherever thou art shall seem Erin to me;
In exile thy bosom shall still be my home,
And thine eyes make my climate wherever we roam.”
― Thomas Moore

“You may break, you may shatter the vase, if you will,
But the scent of the roses will hang round it still. ”
― Thomas Moore, Irish Melodies

“Come o'er the sea,
Maiden with me,
Mine through the sunshine, storms and snows;
Seasons may roll,
But the true soul
Burns the same, where'er it goes.”
― Thomas Moore

“The ordinary arts we practice every day at home are of more importance to the soul than their simplicity might suggest.”
― Thomas Moore

“We need people in our lives with whom we can be as open as possible. To have real conversations with people may seem like such a simple, obvious suggestion, but it involves courage and risk.”
― Thomas Moore

“The devil...the prowde spirite...cannot endure to be mocked.”
― Thomas Moore

“The problem in narcissism is not the high ideals and ambitions, it's the difficulty one encounters when trying to give them body.”
― Thomas Moore

“Go where we may, rest where we will,
Eternal London haunts us still.”
― Thomas Moore

“The key to seeing the world's soul, and in the process wakening our own, is to get over the confusion by which we think that fact is real and imagination is illusion.”
― Thomas Moore, Original Self: Living with Paradox and Originality

“Finding the right work is like discovering your own soul in the world.”
― Thomas Moore

“It is not while beauty
And youth are thine own
And thy cheeks
Unprofaned by a tear
That the ferver and faith
Of a soul can be known
To which time will but
Make thee more dear
No the heart that has truly loved
Never forgets
But as truly loves
On to the close
As the sunflower turns
On her god when he sets
The same look which
She'd turned when he rose.”
― Thomas Moore

“It's my conviction that slight shifts in imagination have more impact on living than major efforts at change... deep changes in life follow movements in imagination.”
― Thomas Moore

“I am an optimist, unrepentant and militant. After all, in order not to be a fool, an optimist must know what a sad place the world can be. It is only the pessimist who finds this out anew every day.”
― Thomas Moore

“DOST thou not hear the silver bell,
Through yonder lime-trees ringing?
'Tis my lady's light gazelle.
To me her love thoughts bringing, —
All the while that silver bell
Around his dark neck ringing.”
― Thomas Moore

“[WISE WORDS QUOTE] "It's the pausing and the stopping, perhaps going backward and losing some time, not being able to do everything we're supposed to do, that serves the soul. That's the enchantment that feeds the soul.”
― Thomas Moore

“Besides, the story is ambivalent and mysterious in its ending. Is this Alkestis returning from down below? Why does she have a veil over her face? Could it be that when we forcefully bring back to life what has been lost through love what we get is only a shate of its former reality? Maybe we can never succeed fully in restoring the soul to life. Maybe she will always be veiled and at least partially shielded from the rigors of actual life. Love demands a submission that is total.”
― Thomas Moore, Care of the Soul: Guide for Cultivating Depth and Sacredne

“We have to start from the ground up and reconsider what education is. In my language, I'd like to see us educate the soul, and not just the mind. The result would be a person who could be in the world creatively, make good friendships, live in a place he loved, do work that is rewarding, and make a contribution to the community. People say that the word "educate" means to "draw out" a person's potential. But I like the "duc" - part in the middle of it. To be educated is to become a duke, a leader, a person of stature and color, a presence and a character.”
― Thomas Moore

“I feel like one
Who treads alone
Some banquet-hall deserted,
Whose lights are fled,
Whose garland's dead,
And all but he departed!”
― Thomas Moore

“Flight usually intensifies the very thing one flees and establishes a special intimacy with it.”
― Thomas Moore

“Good Demeter mothering keeps a child in the heat and passion of life which immortalize and establish soulfulness. Mothering involves not only physical survival and achievement—Demeter's grain and fruit—it is also concerned with guiding a child to his or her unknown depths and the mystery of fate.”
― Thomas Moore, Care of the Soul: A Guide for Cultivating Depth and Sacredness in Everyday Life

“How many times do we lose an occasion for soul work by leaping ahead to final solutions without pausing to savor the undertones? We are a radically bottom-line society, eager to act and to end tension, and thus we lose opportunities to know ourselves for our motives and our secrets.”
― Thomas Moore, Care of the Soul: A Guide for Cultivating Depth and Sacredness in Everyday Life

“Soul is to be found in the vicinity of taboo.”
― Thomas Moore, Care of the Soul: Guide for Cultivating Depth and Sacredne

“they wonder much to hear that gold, which in itself is so useless a thing, should be everywhere so much esteemed, that even men for whom it was made, and by whom it has its value, should yet be thought of less value than it is." - utopia”
― Thomas Moore

“For great and horrible punishments be appointed for thieves, wheras much rather provision should have been made that there were some means they might get their living, so that no man should be driven to this necessity.”
― Thomas Moore

“The many great gardens of the world, of literature and poetry, of painting and music, of religion and architecture, all make the point as clear as possible: The soul cannot thrive in the absence of a garden. If you don’t want paradise, you are not human; and if you are not human, you don’t have a soul.”
― Thomas Moore

“Sex and religion are closer to each other that either might prefer.”
― Thomas Moore

“A piece of the sky and a chunk of the earth lie lodged in the heart of every human being.”
― Thomas Moore

“Socrates and Jesus, two teachers of virtue and love, were executed because of the unsettling, threatening power of their souls, which was revealed in their personal lives and in their words.”
― Thomas Moore, Care of the Soul: A Guide for Cultivating Depth and Sacredness in Everyday Life

“When we relate to our bodies as having soul, we attend to their beauty, their poetry and their expressiveness. Our very habit of treating the body as a machine, whose muscles are like pulleys and its organs engines, forces its poetry underground, so that we experience the body as an instrument and see its poetics only in illness.”
― Thomas Moore, Care of the Soul: A Guide for Cultivating Depth and Sacredness in Everyday Life

“Body exercise is incomplete if it focuses exclusively on muscle and is motivated by the ideal of a physique unspoiled by fat.”
― Thomas Moore, Care of the Soul: A Guide for Cultivating Depth and Sacredness in Everyday Life

“Gnostic tales tell of the homesickness of the soul, its yearning for its own milieu…”
― Thomas Moore, Original Self: Living with Paradox and Originality

“An enchanted life has many
moments when the heart is
overwhelmed by beauty and
the imagination is electrified
by some haunting quality in
the world or by a spirit or voice
speaking from deep within
a thing, a place, or a person.”
― Thomas Moore