Spirits In Literature

While you are not able to serve men, how can you serve spirits [of the dead]?...While you do not know life, how can you know about death?

Confucius (551 BC - 479 BC)

There was something awesome in the thought of the solitary mortal standing by the open window and summoning in from the gloom outside the spirits of the nether world.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859 - 1930)

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

William Shakespeare (1564 - 1616)

Enlighten the people, generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like spirits at the dawn of day.

Thomas Jefferson (1743 - 1826)

Natives who beat drums to drive off evil spirits are objects of scorn to smart Americans who blow horns to break up traffic jams.

Mary Ellen Kelly

The artist alone sees spirits. But after he has told of their appearing to him, everybody sees them

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 - 1832)

But psychoanalysis has taught that the dead—a dead parent, for example—can be more alive for us, more powerful, more scary, than the living. It is the question of ghosts.

Jacques Derrida (1930 - 2004), Quoted in New York Times, January 23, 1994

At first cock-crow the ghosts must go
Back to their quiet graves below.

Theodosia Garrison

Sleep after toil, port after stormy seas, ease after war, death after life does greatly please.

Edmund Spenser (1552 - 1599)

The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.

Joseph Conrad (1857 - 1924), Under Western Eyes, 1911

Listen . . . With faint dry sound, Like steps of passing ghosts, The leaves, frost-crisp'd, break free from the trees And fall.

Adelaide Crapsey (1878 - 1914)

Source: November Night

What beck'ning ghost, along the moonlight shade Invites my steps, and points to yonder glade?

Alexander Pope (1688 - 1744)

Source: Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady, 1717

The good he scorn'd Stalk'd off reluctant, like an ill-us'd ghost, Not to return; or if it did, its visits Like those of angels, short, and far between.

Robert Blair (1699 - 1746)

Source: The Grave, line 586, (1743)

The study of mathematics is apt to commence in disappointment. . . . We are told that by its aid the stars are weighed and the billions of molecules in a drop of water are counted. Yet, like the ghost of Hamlet's father, this greatest science eludes the efforts of our mental weapons to grasp it.

Alfred Whitehead (1861 - 1947)

Source: An Introduction to Mathematics

GHOST, n. The outward and visible sign of an inward fear.

Ambrose Bierce (1842 - 1914)

Source: The Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce

The faint, far-off results of those energies which God's creative rapture implanted in matter when He made the worlds are what we now call physical pleasures; and even thus filtered, they are too much for our present management. What would it be to taste at the fountainhead of that stream of which even these lower reaches prove so intoxicating? Yet that, I believe, is what lies before us. As St. Augustine said, the rapture of the saved soul will "flow over" into the glorified body. In the light of our present specialized and depraved appetites, we cannot imagine this [torrent of pleasure], and I warn everyone most seriously not to try. But it must be mentioned, to drive out thoughts even more misleading - thoughts that what is saved is a mere ghost, or that the risen body lives in numb insensibility. The body is made for the Lord, and these dismal fancies are wide of the mark.

Jack Lewis (1898 - 1963)

Source: The Weight of Glory

Vex not his ghost: O let him pass; he hates him That would upon the rack of this tough world Stretch him out longer.

William Shakespeare (1564 - 1616)

Source: King Lear, Act V, scene iii.

That affable familiar ghost Which nightly gulls him with intelligence,

William Shakespeare (1564 - 1616)

Source: Sonnet 86

Unhand me, gentlemen, By heaven, I'll make a ghost of him that lets me.

William Shakespeare (1564 - 1616)

Source: Hamlet, Act 1, scene

True love is like ghosts, which everybody talks about and few have seen.

Duc de La Rochefoucauld (1613 - 1680)

She was a phantom of delight When first she gleamed upon my sight, A lovely apparition, sent To be a moment's ornament; Her eyes as stars of twilight fair, Like twilights too her dusky hair, But all things else about her drawn From May-time and the cheerful dawn.

William Wordsworth (1770 - 1850)

Source: She was a Phantom of Delight.

SPOOKER, n. A writer whose imagination concerns itself with supernatural phenomena, especially in the doings of spooks.

Ambrose Bierce (1842 - 1914)

Source: The Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce

People believe in supernatural influences.~ They always have.

Isaac Asimov (1920 - 1992)

Source: Forward the Foundation (Foundation Novels (Paperback)), Page: 177

I sincerely congratulate you on the arrival of the mockingbird. Learn all the children to venerate it as a superior being in the form of a bird, or as a being which will haunt them if any harm is done to itself or its eggs.

Thomas Jefferson (1743 - 1826)

Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

H.L. Mencken (1880 - 1956)

Source: A Book of Burlesques, 1920

Where'er we tread, 't is haunted, holy ground.

Lord Byron (1788 - 1824)

Source: Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto ii. Stanza 88.