keep body and soul together, to

To survive, especially through very modest means. I had to ask my parents to loan me money because, thanks to those hospital bills, I don't even have enough to keep body and soul together.

Fig. to manage to keep existing, especially when one has very little money. (Compare this with keep the wolf from the door.) We hardly had enough to keep body and soul together. I don't earn enough money to keep body and soul together.

Stay alive, support life, as in He earns barely enough to keep body and soul together. This expression alludes to the belief that the soul gives life to the body, which therefore cannot survive without it. Today it most often is applied to earning a living. [Early 1700s]

If you do something to keep body and soul together, you do it to earn enough money to buy the basic things that you need to live. 20-year-old Rafael says he's selling firewood to keep body and soul together. Note: You can also say that you hold body and soul together. For a while he held body and soul together by working as a migrant laborer.

To sustain life, often just barely. This term, frequently used to describe a job that pays scarcely enough to live on, rests on the idea that the soul gives life to the body, which dies when the soul is separated from it. Dating from the early eighteenth century, it became a cliché by the mid-nineteenth century or so. Writing on prostitution in the Manchester Guardian in 1974, Suzanne Lowry quipped, “Keeping body and soul together is never as difficult as trying to keep them separate.”