Bhagavad Gita Quotes on Nature of the Soul

The child, the youth and the elder are one person.

It is never born and never dies; it simply is.

Memory is short; the soul's journey is long.

Life is older than any single ending.

What pervades everything cannot be destroyed.

Bodies are finite; the one who wears them is not.

Let understanding sit beside your grief, not replace it.

The one who dwells within every body cannot be harmed.

Age changes the body, not the one who lives in it.

Beneath all that breaks, something unbroken holds.

What you truly are neither wounds nor is wounded.

Nothing outside can cut, burn, drown or dry the self.

Those we love are not erased by time; they belong to a continuing whole.

Hold today's grief inside a much larger horizon.

You have outgrown many versions of yourself, and you are still here.

The self is the thread; childhood and old age are beads.

Loss touches the form, not the essence.

Understanding the deathless self softens the heart toward every being.

There is a part of you no storm can reach.

What is beyond change is beyond the reach of loss.

See the same indwelling light in everyone, and compassion comes easily.

Fear of ending shrinks when you remember continuity.

If growing up did not end you, why fear the next change?

You are woven into something that cannot be unmade.

Even deep hurt cannot reach the innermost self.

The body's story has an ending; the self's does not.

Grief softens when it meets something unchanging.

A change of form is not a loss of self.

Your essence is untouched by what happens to your form.

See in everyone a self that no event can finally diminish.

Nothing that ends can touch what never began.

When the body ends, the self is not ended with it.

Fear thins when you remember what in you never changes.

See the eternal in others, and cruelty loses its footing.

Let that thought make you brave.

When circumstances burn, remember what stays unburnt.

Treat every being gently: the same deathless self lives in all.

Grief for others is love; wisdom lets it rest in a larger frame.

Reverence for life begins with reverence for what lives in it.

Every stage of life is a room in the same house.

Hold the body with care and the self with trust.

Honour the body's limits without mistaking them for your own.

The self stands outside the cycle of harm.

You are older than your worries.

One who knows the self as indestructible loses the sense of being a destroyer.

Change is the self's wardrobe, never its end.

Fire and flood pass over what cannot be touched.

Your core is beyond the reach of every weapon the world owns.

Fear loses ground where you remember the untouchable.

What cannot be dried or wetted cannot be diminished by moods.

No one's essence can be taken from them.

Faith begins when you sense what nothing can destroy.

How would you spend today if you honoured both the body and the self?

How would you act today if you saw the imperishable in everyone you meet?

Water softens stone, yet cannot wet the self.

The unmanifest holds more than the visible can show.

Look past the form to what lives in each being.

Invulnerable at the core, tender at the surface: every creature is both.

What changes in how you treat people when you see what dwells within them?

Be gentle with today; you are far older than it.

You are a spark of something eternal.

Everything that changes is perishable; something in you does not.

What is truly you has no first day and no last.

Like worn clothes, bodies are set aside; the wearer goes on.

A drop of the ocean carries the ocean’s nature.

Unburnt, undrowned, unmoved: that is your deepest nature.

The self cannot be seen, imagined or changed; it can only be known.

The self is a wonder that words approach and never capture.

The self is a well that never needs outside rain.

You have lived more than you remember.

Dwell in the Self, and the world loses its pull.

What is imperishable cannot be lost, only forgotten.

A body is a house, not the self.

You belong to something that was never absent and will not vanish.

Mistaking the body for the self is the root of many fears.

Ancient, unborn, ever-present: that is what you are.

An ending can be a change of garments, not a loss of the wearer.

Eternal and all-pervading: you are not small.

Eternal in essence, temporary in costume.

Knowing the self is indestructible changes how you treat everything.

Stand in the part of you that nothing can wound.

Heat and cold pass; the one who feels them remains.

The deluded see the body and miss the one within.

Being does not begin or end with a single lifetime.

Life in any one body is a chapter, not the whole book.

Let go of what has worn out; it was never you.

A wave appears, rises, and returns to the sea; none of that is a mistake.

Wisdom is seeing beyond the roles of doer and sufferer.

Eternity is not later; it is the nature of what you are now.

Steady, ancient, everywhere: the self is its own foundation.

Trust the part of you that stays when everything else moves.

Limited memory, limitless soul.

What would change if you knew nothing could touch your core?

Your years are guests; your true self is the home.

The elements govern the body; they have no authority over the self.

Primeval means older than your doubts.

What part of you has never been damaged?

Even the unseen is part of the whole.

Not knowing your past is no reason to fear your future.

What does the part of you that never began remember?