The soul selects her own society,
Then shuts the door

The Soul selects her own Society — Then — shuts the Door — To her divine Majority — Present no more —

I'll tell you something. Once I was very fond of a poem by Emily Dickinson or somebody. I only remember one line of it, but it goes, 'The soul selects her own society.' I used to tell it to everybody. Once I quoted it to a friend of mine, and he said, 'Maybe, but the body gets thrown into bed with the goddamnedest people.

The Soul selects her own Society — Then — shuts the Door — To her divine Majority — Present no more — Unmoved — she notes the Chariots — pausing — At her low Gate — Unmoved — an Emperor be kneeling
Upon her Mat — I've known her — from an ample nation — Choose One — Then — close the Valves of her attention — Like Stone —

The soul is here for its own joy.

At every moment you choose yourself. But do you choose *your* self? Body and soul contain a thousand possibilities out of which you can build many I's. But in one of them is there a congruence of the elector and the elected. Only one — which you will never find until you have excluded all those superficial and fleeting possibilities of being and doing with which you toy, out of curiosity or wonder or greed, and which hinder you from casting anchor in the experience of the mystery of life, and the consciousness of the talent entrusted to you which is your *I*.

Each of us literally chooses, by his way of attending to things, what sort of universe he shall appear to himself to inhabit.

If you want to be surrounded by Souls, become identified with your Soul.
It takes one to know one!

Solitude sometimes is best society.

I must make up my mind which is right – society or I.

That soul that can reflect upon itself, consider itself, is more than so.

We talk of choosing our friends, but our friends are self-elected.

We are our choices.

"Call the world, if you please, "the Vale of Soul Making". Then you will find out the use of the world....

There may be intelligences or sparks of the divinity in millions — but they are not Souls till they acquire identities, till each one is personally itself.

Intelligences are atoms of perception — they know and they see and they are pure, in short they are God. How then are Souls to be made? How then are these sparks which are God to have identity given them — so as ever to possess a bliss peculiar to each one's individual existence. How, but in the medium of a world like this?

This point I sincerely wish to consider, because I think it a grander system of salvation than the Christian religion — or rather it is a system of Spirit Creation...

I can scarcely express what I but dimly perceive — and yet I think I perceive it — that you may judge the more clearly I will put it in the most homely form possible. I will call the world a school instituted for the purpose of teaching little children to read. I will call the human heart the hornbook used in that school. And I will call the child able to read, the soul made from that school and its hornbook.

Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul? A place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways....

As various as the lives of men are — so various become their souls, and thus does God make individual beings, souls, identical souls of the sparks of his own essence.

This appears to me a faint sketch of a system of salvation which does not affront our reason and humanity..."