Thomas Moore Quotes

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.

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.

There is no way to re-enchant our lives in a disenchanted culture except by becoming renegades from that culture and planting the seeds for a new one.

Some early writing say that when people kiss, they exchange the soul, that it's between their mouths and tongues that the soul is exchanged. And so the kiss is more of a soulful connection maybe than intercourse and other ways of being together. A kiss asks a lot from you. I think it asks a lot from a person to really kiss.

Silence is not an absence of sound but rather a shifting of attention toward sounds that speak to the soul.

Pythagoras asks that we not let a friend go lightly, for whatever reason. Instead, we should stay with a friend as long as we can, until we're compelled to abandon him completely against our will. It's a serious thing to toss away money, but to cast aside a person is even more serious. Nothing in human life is more rarely found, nothing more dearly possessed. No loss is more chilling or more dangerous than that of a friend.

The soul doesn't distinguish between good and bad as much as between what is nutritious and what isn't. Finding the right work is like discovering your own soul in the world.

Quote from CARE OF THE SOUL...Thomas Moore ...to the soul, the most minute details and the most ordinary activities, carried out with mindfullness and art, have an effect far beyond their apparant insignificance.

An enchanted world is one that speaks to the soul, to the mysterious depths of the heart and imagination where we find value, love, and union with the world around us. As mystics of many religions have taught, that sense of rapturous union can give a sensation of fulfillment that makes life purposeful and vibrant.

A soulmate is someone to whom we feel profoundly connected, as though the communicating and communing that take place between us were not the product of intentional efforts, but rather a divine grace.

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.

Most, if not all, problems brought to therapists are issues of love. It makes sense that the cure is also love.

What's important is finding out what works for you.

The garden reconciles human art and wild nature, hard work and deep pleasure, spiritual practice and the material world. It is a magical place because it is not divided. The many divisions and polarizations that terrorize a disenchanted world find peaceful accord among mossy rock walls, rough stone paths, and trimmed bushes. Maybe a garden sometimes seems fragile, for all its earth and labor, because it achieves such an extraordinary delicate balance of nature and human life, naturalness and artificiality. It has its own liminality, its point of balance between great extremes.

Sweet flowers alone can say what passion fears revealing.

Let me define a garden as the meeting of raw nature and the human imagination in which both seek the fulfillment of their beauty. Every sign indicates that nature wants us and wishes for collaboration with us, just as we long for nature to be fulfilled in us. If our original state was to live in a garden, as Adam and Eve did, then a garden signals our absolute origins as well as our condition of eternity, while life outside the garden is time and temporality.

This is the right time, and this is the right thing.

It is quite cruel that a poet cannot wander through his regions of enchantment without having a critic, forever, like the old man of the sea, upon his back.

In our prayer and meditation we hope for fulfilling ordinary life.

Faith, Fanatic faith, once wedded fast to some dear falsehood, hugs it to the last.

[Angels] guide us to become spiritual people for the pleasure of it... because the spiritual life itself has a great deal of beauty and real satisfaction, even pleasure. And this is what the soul needs.

We let a river shower its banks with a spirit that invades the people living there, and we protect that river, knowing that without its blessings the people have no source of soul.

The past, the future: - two eternities!

A philosopher being asked what was the first thing necessary to win the love of a woman, answered, Opportunity!

Came but for friendship, and took away love.