What Is Soul?

Interviews with people from a wide range of ages and occupations - and quotes from icons of the past - address one of the most important and neglected questions of modern times: What is soul? "You want to see soul? Go look in the eyes of a newborn child, ‘cause that’s where it is. And the world is going to conspire to destroy that, or at least repress it. Don’t be ashamed to say you like something! Don’t be ashamed to experience something! It can’t hurt you! That’s part of the secret language of soul: the ability to allow yourself to respond to the amazing and infinite number of wonders that life presents to you every day." ~ Rick Kogan "Friendship is a single soul dwelling in two bodies." ~ Aristotle "If you’ve ever met someone that you’ve never met before, but you have an instant connection to them, it’s that your soul recognizes their soul. We might have never met before, but our souls once knew each other on some level in the past." ~ Rabbi Andrea Cosnowski "Soul is when you take a song and make it a part of you – a part that’s so true, so real, people think it must have happened to you. It’s like electricity – we don’t really know what it is, but it’s a force that can light a room." ~ Ray Charles "There’s a criterion of inclusivity for someone to be soulful. If there’s an exclusion of other people by anyone, I think they’ve abdicated their right to be soulful." ~ Cliff Colnot "Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul." ~ Mark Twain "A lot of what’s essential and vital and core about the human experience is pretty stinky, and people want to turn away from that. If you think of soul as the equivalent of the full richness and uniqueness of human experience, you can’t have it both ways. You can’t be fully soulful with just the romantic, nice parts of it." ~ Charles Jaffe "In the end, when you’re lost, desperate, depressed, you still have that little something called soul. It’s something that you can never lose. You can lose all the material things in your life, your hopes, everything, but you don’t ever lose that thing that is really the essence of what you are. It’s even something that can save your life." ~ Elsa Mora "Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place." ~ Zora Neale Hurston