50 Profound Quotes to Touch Your Soul

By Clifton Sankofa | Updated September 2, 2023

Expand your idea of excellence with our profound quotes.

Profound is one of the most exciting words in the English language.

It describes an amazing state of being or stellar performance.

Let’s explore the word with our profound quotes.

What does profound mean?

The word profound means a state, quality, or emotion of great intensity.

It describes something that is felt deeply and touches our soul.

It can also apply to a person or statement demonstrating great knowledge or insight.

Check out these facts about the word profound:

Profound comes from the Old English word profound.
It also has roots in the Latin word profundus, meaning deep.
The earliest applications of the word were to show deep insight.

What are some profound parts of life?

Life is profound.

Many of us take the most impressive aspects of life for granted.

The sun coming up, gravity, your nervous system, the water cycle, bird migration, or even the fungus kingdom are all very complicated and profound aspects of life on Earth.

To appreciate all of the profound things and experiences life has to offer, we must retrain our vision.

Waking up in the morning to a new day might seem mundane.

But it is profound for everyone who will not wake up and enjoy another day of life.

How the toilet in your house magically removes your waste and takes it somewhere you do not have to be accountable for it is profound.

Shifting our vision to appreciate the profound takes practice

The world is full of bright lights, advertisements, and experiences for sale.

However, all of these forms of stimulus can take away from our ability to find peace of mind internally.

You are an example of the profound.

Our existence is profound.

The odds of being born are astronomically profound.

Yet, how many of us think our lives lack meaning or value during mundane moments?

How often have we complained under our breath while doing the dishes or scrubbing our bathtubs?

Practice makes perfect

Perceiving the profound allows a person to shift their perspective from “We have to do chores” to “We get to do chores.”

Scrubbing a plate while angry just makes us dislike the very activities that keep us alive and well.

Shifting the experience to one where we thank the plate for the delicious meal it held for us while we wash it is a simple exercise where one can begin to shift into a state of appreciation for the profound.

Short profound quotes about life’s impactful moments

We start with these short profound quotes about the sublime nature of life.

1. “The most profound things are inexpressible.” — Jenny Holzer

2. “Sometimes the simplest things are the most profound.” — Carolina Herrera

3. “The most profound statements are often said in silence.” — Lynn Johnston

4. “My Father had a profound influence on me. He was a lunatic.” — Spike Milligan

5. “Dreams are often most profound when they seem the most crazy. ” — Sigmund Freud

6. “To know anything well involves a profound sensation of ignorance.” — John Ruskin

7. “Genius might be the ability to say a profound thing in a simple way.” — Charles Bukowski

8. “He has a profound respect for old age. Especially when it’s bottled.” — Gene Fowler

9. “Real nobility is based on scorn, courage, and profound indifference.” — Albert Camus

10. “There is a profound and ineradicable taint of antisemitism in the British.” — David Mamet

The top profound quotes celebrating the beauty of humanity

Here are some beautiful, deep quotes celebrating what makes humanity amazing.

11. “Truly profound and original insights are to be found only in studying the exemplary.” — Warren Bennis

12. “By respect for life, we become religious in a way that is elementary, profound, and alive.” — Albert Schweitzer

13. “That was when I realized that music is the most profound, magical form of communication there is.” — Lesley Garrett

14. “He who follows his lessons tastes a profound peace, and looks upon everybody as a bunch of manure.” — Moliere

15. “The country has undergone a profound social upheaval, the greatest the proletariat has ever known.” — C. L. R. James

16. “No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher.” — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

17. “Women seem not to understand, or underestimate, the profound power they have over their husbands.” — Laura Schlessinger

18. “The opposite of a fact is falsehood, but the opposite of one profound truth may very well be another profound truth.” — Niels Bohr

19. “There can only be one state of mind as you approach any profound test; total concentration, a spirit of togetherness, and strength.” — Pat Riley

20. “It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful: they are found because it was possible to find them.” — J. Robert Oppenheimer

The best profound quotes about life’s crucial lessons

21. “Isn’t it the moment of most profound doubt that gives birth to new certainties?” — Vaclav Havel

22. “There is something permanent, and something extremely profound, in owning a home.” — Kenny Guinn

23. “Life should be blissful, and blissful doesn’t mean just a small happiness. It’s huge. It is profound.” — David Lynch

24. “Don’t you believe that there is in man a deep so profound as to be hidden even to him in whom it is?” — Saint Augustine

25. “The universe is built on a plan the profound symmetry of which is somehow present in the inner structure of our intellect.” — Paul Valery

26. “What is crucial in dealing with loss is not to lose the lesson. That makes you a winner in the most profound sense.” — Dayananda Saraswati

27. “I don’t need anyone to rectify my existence. The most profound relationship we will ever have is the one with ourselves.” — Shirley MacLaine

28. “A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other.” — Charles Dickens

29. “Since my subjects have always been my sensations, my states of mind, and the profound reactions that life has been producing in me.” — Frida Kahlo

30. “How many people make themselves abstract to appear profound? The most useful part of abstract terms are the shadows they create to hide a vacuum.” — Joseph Joubert

Famous profound quotes from brilliant minds

Here, some of the world’s brilliant minds share profound quotes and observations.

31. “Sometimes a concept is baffling not because it is profound but because it is wrong.” — E. O. Wilson

32. “To desire and expect nothing for oneself and to have profound sympathy for others is genuine holiness.” — Ivan Turgenev

33. “To tell the truth is to become beautiful, to begin to love yourself, value yourself. And that’s political, in its most profound way. ” — June Jordan

34. “There are moments of existence when time and space are more profound, and the awareness of existence is immensely heightened.” — Charles Baudelaire

35. “Nothing can express the aim and meaning of our work better than the profound words of St. Augustine – ‘Beauty is the splendor of Truth.’” — Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

36. “What is required is a profound and thorough conviction of the justice, necessity, and importance of political and social rights.” — B. R. Ambedkar

37. “War has always been the grand sagacity of every spirit which has grown too inward and too profound; its curative power lies even in the wounds one receives.” — Friedrich Nietzsche

38. “We will not find the inner strength to evolve to a higher level if we do not inwardly develop this profound feeling that there is something higher than ourselves.” — Rudolf Steiner

39. “Through our great good fortune, in our youth, our hearts were touched with fire. It was given to us to learn at the outset that life is a profound and passionate thing.” — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

40. “I must always try to do better because perfectionism, and the need to always have new goals and achieve them, is a state of mind that brings profound meaning to life.” — Giorgio Armani

Profound quotes and sayings to live by

Let’s close our list with these profound quotes about life.

41. “I just had this profound love for storytelling.” — Brad Pitt

42. “No union is more profound than marriage.” — Anthony Kennedy

43. “Our intuition about the future is linear. But the reality of information technology is exponential, and that makes a profound difference.” — Ray Kurzweil

44. “I do realize and understand very well on a profound level how lucky I am and what a privileged position it is and what it’s done ultimately for me, my family, and my kids.” — Johnny Depp

45. “What is a poet? An unhappy person who conceals profound anguish in his heart but whose lips are so formed that as sighs and cries pass over them, they sound like beautiful music.” — Soren Kierkegaard

46. “The man who is aware of himself is henceforward independent, and he is never bored, and life is only too short, and he is steeped through and through with a profound yet temperate happiness.” — Virginia Woolf

47. “I’m a great believer that any tool that enhances communication has profound effects in terms of how people can learn from each other, and how they can achieve the kind of freedoms that they’re interested in.” — Bill Gates

48. “I’ve found cinnamon to be very effective for lowering the glycemic response to meals. People have heard that before, but I didn’t realize how profound it could be until I did the actual testing with continuous glucose monitors.” — Tim Ferriss

49. “Yet it is in this loneliness that the deepest activities begin. It is here that you discover act without motion, labor that is profound repose, vision in obscurity, and, beyond all desire, a fulfillment whose limits extend to infinity. ” — Thomas Merton

50. “Synergy is what happens when one plus one equals ten or a hundred or even a thousand! It’s the profound result when two or more respectful human beings determine to go beyond their preconceived ideas to meet a great challenge. ” — Stephen Covey