Care of the soul can be demanding, requiring a decision that the needs of the soul are as important as the more future-oriented things that claim our attention.

Only in a thoroughly unrelated world can we poison nature without conscience, neglect our children and the poor, and righteously slay thousands of enemy soldiers because we don't have the patience or imagination for negotiation.

In a story told in many traditions and versions; a man is crouched over the ground at night under a lamppost obviously looking for something.  A passerby asks, "Have you lost something?", "Yes, my key," he says.  "Did you lose it here?"  "No", he says, "over there, but there's light over here."

Love comes from years of breathing skin to skin tangled in each other's dreams until each night weaves another thread in the same web of blood and sleep and I have only passed through quickly like light and you have only surrounded me suddenly like flame

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.

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 everyside to become efficient rather than intimate.