Thomas Moore Quotes

It is only through mystery and madness that the soul is revealed

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.

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.

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.

It is precisely because we resist the darkness in ourselves that we miss the depths of the loveliness, beauty, brilliance, creativity, and joy that lie at our core.

Go where we may, rest where we will, Eternal London haunts us still.

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.

Fight on my men,"says Sir Andrew Barton, I am hurt,but I am not slain; I'll lay me down and bleed a-while, And then I'll rise and fight again".

Earth has no sorrow that heaven cannot heal.

And the heart that is soonest awake to the flowers Is always the first to be touched by the thorns.

Maybe it’s true what Thomas Moore said: “It is only through mystery and madness that the soul is revealed.

...to the soul, the most minute details and the most ordinary activities, carried out with mindfulness and art, have an effect far beyond their apparent insignificance.

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.

Finding the right work is like discovering your own soul in the world.

The devil...the prowde spirite...cannot endure to be mocked.

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

A genuine odyssey is not about piling up experiences. It is a deeply felt, risky, unpredictable tour of the soul.

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.

You may break, you may shatter the vase, if you will, But the scent of the roses will hang round it still.

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.

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.

Love doesn't demand perfection, but it does ask you to give yourself with less reserve than you'd prefer.

I have plenty of machinery around me; what I really need is a more enchanting world in which to live and work.

When soul is neglected, it doesn't just go away; it appears symptomatically in obsessions, addictions, violence, and loss of meaning.

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.

To the soul, memory is more important than planning, art more compelling than reason, and love more fulfilling than understanding.

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.

Sex and religion are closer to each other that either might prefer.

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.

It is in the nature of things to be drawn to the very experiences that will spoil our innocence, transform our lives, and give us necessary complexity and depth.

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

Soul is to be found in the vicinity of taboo.

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.

There's nothing half so sweet in life as love's young dream.

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

Usually, the main problem with life conundrums is that we don't bring to them enough imagination

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.

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.

One effective “trick” in caring for the soul is to look with special attention and openness at what the individual rejects, and then to speak favorably for that rejected element.

Spirituality is seeded, germinates, sprouts and blossoms in the mundane. It is to be found and nurtured in the smallest of daily activities.

Often care of the soul means not taking sides when there is a conflict at a deep level. It may be necessary to stretch the heart wide enough to embrace contradiction and paradox.

As the poets and painters of centuries have tried to tell us, art is not about the expression of talent or the making of pretty things. It is about the preservation and containment of soul. It is about arresting life and making it available for contemplation. Art captures the eternal in the everyday, and it is the eternal that feeds soul—the whole world in a grain of sand. Leonardo

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.

During the dark night there is no choice but to surrender control, give in to unknowing, and stop and listen to whatever signals of wisdom might come along. It’s a time of enforced retreat and perhaps unwilling withdrawal. The dark night is more than a learning experience; it’s a profound initiation into a realm that nothing in the culture, so preoccupied with external concerns and material success, prepares you for.

art intensifies the presence of the world.

Something deep in human make up needs and longs for a taste of eternity--a momentary release from the relentless pace of time.

Flight usually intensifies the very thing one flees and establishes a special intimacy with it.

Home is an emotional state, a place in the imagination where feelings of security, belonging, placement, family, protection, memory and personal history abide. -Thomas Moore

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.

Gnostic tales tell of the homesickness of the soul, its yearning for its own milieu…

Body exercise is incomplete if it focuses exclusively on muscle and is motivated by the ideal of a physique unspoiled by fat.

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

Learn to live small and you will discover great pleasures. You will accomplish more in your life than you could ever predict if you were overly ambitious.

But anyone who deliberately tries to get himself elected to a public office is permanently disqualified from holding one.

Only when you are fully engaged can you see the activity that will make your life feel worth living.

Many of the arts practiced at home are especially nourishing to the soul because they foster contemplation and demand a degree of artfulness, such as arranging flowers, cooking, and making repairs.

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.

But this is human life: the war, the deeds, The disappointment, the anxiety, Imagination’s struggles, far and nigh, All human; bearing in themselves this good, That they are still the air, the subtle food, To make us feel existence. -Keats, Endymion This is the ‘goal’ of the soul path – to feel existence; not to overcome life’s struggles and anxieties, but to know life first hand, to exist fully in context. (Thomas Moore, Care of the Soul, p.260)

The basic intention in any caring, physical or psychological, is to alleviate suffering. But in relation to the symptom itself, observance means first of all listening and looking carefully at what is being revealed in the suffering. An intent to heal can get in the way of seeing.

A piece of the sky and a chunk of the earth lie lodged in the heart of every human being.

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

Maybe one function of love is to cure us of an anemic imagination, a life emptied of romantic attachment and abandoned to reason.

The basic contribution one can make to one's community is not to add to the general unconsciousness of the time.

Don’t take anything literally but always look deeper. For example, if you drink too much, what is your soul looking for in the alcohol? If you eat too much, what part of your soul is in need of nourishing? Think poetically and never respond on a surface level. 4.

Any writer who puts his words and thoughts out into the public is going to be criticized.

Few things are more important than finding a home and working at it constantly to make it resonate with deep memories and fulfill deep longings.

There are places in this world that are neither here nor there, neither up nor down, neither real nor imaginary...

Horror is a lot like sex,” Moore continued. “It’s raw and it’s primal and when it’s good—when it’s really good—it even hurts a little. But the good kind of pain, you know?

Most of the people I know who are having trouble finding their life work are somewhat passive in style. They wait for something good to happen to them rather than make strong positive moves.

Technologies of the soul tend to be simple, bodily, slow and related to the heart as much as the mind. Everything around us tells us we should be mechanically sophisticated, electronic, quick, and informational in our expressiveness - an exact antipode to the virtues of the soul. It is no wonder, then, that in an age of telecommunications - which, by the way, literally means "distant connections" - we suffer symptoms of the loss of soul. We are being urged from every side to become efficient rather than intimate.

You discover that when you are doing the right work, you are the right person.

We care for the soul by acknowledging the place of eternal childhood, seeing its disadvantages to be virtuous and its inadequacies to be the conduits of soulful sensitivity.

What if we thought of the family less as the determining influence by which we are formed and more the raw material from which we can make a life?

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.

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.

One day I would like to make up my own DSM-111 with a list of “disorders” I have seen in my practice. For example, I would want to include the diagnosis “psychological modernism,” an uncritical acceptance of the values of the modern world. It includes blind faith in technology, inordinate attachment to material gadgets and conveniences, uncritical acceptance of the march of scientific progress, devotion to the electronic media, and a life-style dictated by advertising.

And they have a problem with Dresden, I take it?" Murphy asked. "Wanna kill him or something. I don't know," Thomas said, nodding. "They tried it on Jet Skis earlier today." "Roger Moore Bond villains?" Murphy asked, her tone derisive. "Seriously?" "Be silent, mortal cow," snarled one of the Sidhe. Murphy tracked her eyes calmly over to that one, and she nodded once, as if memorizing something. "Yeah, okay. You.

The time seems near, if it has not actually arrived, when the chastened sublimity of a moor, a sea, or a mountain will be all of nature that is absolutely in keeping with the moods of the more thinking among mankind.

Soul' is not a thing, but a quality or a dimension of experiencing life and ourselves.

For the soul, depression is an initiation, a rite of passage. If we think that depression, so empty and dull, is void of imagination, we may overlook its initiatory aspects. We may be imagining imagination itself from a point of view foreign to Saturn; emptiness can be rife with feeling-tone, images of catharsis, and emotions of regret and loss. As a shade of mood, gray can be as interesting and as variegated as it is in black-and-white photography. If

Love releases us into the realm of divine imagination, where the soul is expanded and reminded of its unearthly cravings and needs. We think that when a lover inflates his loved one he is failing to acknowledge her flaws - "Love is blind." But it may be the other way around. Love allows a person to see the true angelic nature of another person, the halo, the aureole of divinity. Certainly from the perspective of ordinary life this is madness and illusion. But if we let loose our hold on our philosophies and psychologies of enlightenment and reason, we might learn to appreciate the perspective of eternity that enters life as madness, Plato's divine frenzy.

When you sense that your dark night is one of pregnancy and oceanic return, you could react accordingly and be still. Watch and wonder. Take the human embryo as your model. Assume the fetal position, emotionally and intellectually. Be silent. Float in your darkness as if it were the waters of the womb, and give up trying to fight your way out or make sense of it.

Care of the soul begins with observance of how the soul manifests itself and how it operates. We can’t care for the soul unless we are familiar with its ways. Observance is a word from ritual and religion. It means to watch out for but also to keep and honor, as in the observance of a holiday.

That is the point of the night sea journey—to be born into yourself. There, you are in the amniotic fluid, in an alchemical substance once again. You are journeying toward your own life. You are preparing for your fate. The promise is exhilarating, but the dangers are extreme. You have to avoid being just one of the crowd and instead take the chance of being born an individual. Jonah

The conscious mind is small and weak compared to the emotional and spiritual power that we call daimonic. It may be the urge to create, take risks, and love. Life may be simple when you avoid the daimon of love, but it is also less passionate and meaningful.

I'm painfully aware that the experts in fields like religion and spirituality sometimes feel that bringing mysticism down so far into ordinary life is an insult to the great mystics and makes it all too light and breezy. I feel just the opposite. I believe that one day we'll understand that we've lost out on religion because we made it too lofty and distant. I see it as a simple quality of everyday life, and in that simplicity lie its beauty and importance.

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.

magine a trust in yourself, or another person, or in life itself, that doesn’t need to be proved or demonstrated, that is able to contain uncertainty. People sometimes put their trust in a spiritual leader and are terribly betrayed if that person then fails to live up to ideals. But a real trust of faith would be to decide whether to trust someone, knowing that betrayal is inevitable because life and personality are never without shadow. The vulnerability that faith demands could be matched by an equal trust in oneself, the feeling that one can survive the pain of betrayal.

... ongoing care for the soul rather than seek for a cure appreciates the mystery of human suffering and does not offer the illusion of a problem-free life. I sees every fall into ignorance and confusion as an opportunity to discover that the beast residing at the center of the labyrinth is also an angel. To approach this paradoxial point of tension where adjustment and abnormality meet is to move closer to the realization of our mystery-filled, star-born nature. It is a beast this thing that stirs in the core of our being, but it is also the star of our innermost nature. We have to care for this suffering with extreme reverence so that in our fear and anger at the beast, we do not overlock the star. ~Thomas Moore *Care of the Soul*

Every day you have choices. You can do things that wound your soul, like being dominated by the work ethic or compulsively seeking more money and possessions, or you can be around people who give you pleasure and do things that satisfy a desire deep inside you. Make this soul care a way of life, and you may discover what the Greeks called eudaimonia—a good spirit, or, in the deepest sense, happiness.

The word passion means basically “to be affected,” and passion is the essential energy of the soul. The poet Rilke describes this passive power in the imagery of the flower’s structure, when he calls it a “muscle of infinite reception.” We don’t often think of the capacity to be affected as strength and as the work of a powerful muscle, and yet for the soul, as for the flower, this is its toughest work and its main role in our lives. Things

Soul-making is a journey that takes time, effort, skill, knowledge, intuition, and courage. It is helpful to know that all work with soul is process—alchemy, pilgrimage, and adventure—so that we don’t expert instant success or even any kind of finality. All goals and all endings are heuristic, important in their being imagined, but never literally fulfilled. In

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.

All of us must do our best to live gracefully in the present moment. I now see depression as akin to being tied to a chair with restraints on my wrists. It took me a long time to realize that I only magnify my distress by struggling for freedom. My pain diminished when I gave up trying to escape completely from it. However, don't interpret my current approach to depression as utterly fatalistic. I do whatever I can to dull depression's pain, while premising my life on its continuing presence. The theologian and philosopher Thomas Moore puts it well with his distinction between cure and care. While cure implies the eradication of trouble, care "appreciates the mystery of human suffering and does not offer the illusion of a problem-free life.

Intel engineers did a rough calculation of what would happen had a 1971 Volkswagen Beetle improved at the same rate as microchips did under Moore’s law. These are the numbers: Today, that Beetle would be able to go about three hundred thousand miles per hour. It would get two million miles per gallon of gas, and it would cost four cents! Intel engineers also estimated that if automobile fuel efficiency improved at the same rate as Moore’s law, you could, roughly speaking, drive a car your whole life on one tank of gasoline. What

There is nothing neutral about the soul. It is the seat and the source of life. Either we respond to what the soul presents in its fantasies and desires, or we suffer from this neglect of ourselves. The power of the soul can hurl a person into ecstasy or into depression. It can be creative or destructive, gentle or aggressive. Power incubates within the soul and then makes its influential move into life as the expression of soul. If there is no soulfulness, then there is no true power, and if there is no power, then there can be no true soulfulness. Sadomasochism

... ongoing care for the soul rather than seek for a cure appreciates the mystery of human suffering and does not offer the illusion of a problem-free life. I sees every fall into ignorance and confusion as an opportunity to discover that the beast residing at the center of the labyrinth is also an angel. To approach this paradoxical point of tension where adjustment and abnormality meet is to move closer to the realization of our mystery-filled, star-born nature. It is a beast this thing that stirs in the core of our being, but it is also the star of our innermost nature. We have to care for this suffering with extreme reverence so that in our fear and anger at the beast, we do not overlook the star.

Since I was a small child, I have always tried to maintain my dignity in every situation. At work now, I strive to maintain my professional dignity. At home, with Thomas, I strive to maintain a certain parental dignity, to protect him from overhearing anything that might upset him, or anything untoward. Therefore, because it feels undignified, I have never enjoyed the feeling of anyone else worrying about me or being concerned for my well-being, preferring instead to give the impression that I am always fine, and that I have everything under control. Largely, I believe this image to be an honest one.

It is remarkable, however, that at the very lowest point of Kant's depression, when he became perfectly incapable of conversing with any rational meaning on the ordinary affairs of life, he was still able to answer correctly and distinctly, in a degree that was perfectly astonishing, upon any question of philosophy or of science, especially of physical geography, [Footnote: Physical Geography, in opposition to Political.] chemistry, or natural history. He talked satisfactorily, in his very worst state, of the gases, and stated very accurately different propositions of Kepler’s, especially the law of the planetary motions. And I remember in particular, that upon the very last Monday of his life, when the extremity of his weakness moved a circle of his friends to tears, and he sat amongst us insensible to all we could say to him, cowering down, or rather I might say collapsing into a shapeless heap upon his chair, deaf, blind, torpid, motionless,—even then I whispered to the others that I would engage that Kant should take his part in conversation with propriety and animation. This they found it difficult to believe. Upon which I drew close to his ear, and put a question to him about the Moors of Barbary. To the surprise of everybody but myself, he immediately gave us a summary account of their habits and customs; and told us by the way, that in the word Algiers, the g ought to be pronounced hard (as in the English word gear).

One afternoon in the fall of 2015, while I was writing this book, I was driving in my car and listening to SiriusXM Radio. On the folk music station the Coffee House, a song came on with a verse that directly spoke to me—so much so that I pulled off the road as soon as I could and wrote down the lyrics and the singer’s name. The song was called “The Eye,” and it’s written by the country-folk singer Brandi Carlile and her bandmate Tim Hanseroth and sung by Carlile. I wish it could play every time you open these pages, like a Hallmark birthday card, because it’s become the theme song of this book. The main refrain is: I wrapped your love around me like a chain But I never was afraid that it would die You can dance in a hurricane But only if you’re standing in the eye. I hope that it is clear by now that every day going forward we’re going to be asked to dance in a hurricane, set off by the accelerations in the Market, Mother Nature, and Moore’s law. Some politicians propose to build a wall against this hurricane. That is a fool’s errand. There is only one way to thrive now, and it’s by finding and creating your own eye. The eye of a hurricane moves, along with the storm. It draws energy from it, while creating a sanctuary of stability inside it. It is both dynamic and stable—and so must we be. We can’t escape these accelerations. We have to dive into them, take advantage of their energy and flows where possible, move with them, use them to learn faster, design smarter, and collaborate deeper—all so we can build our own eyes to anchor and propel ourselves and our families confidently forward.