spirituality Quotes

“This supreme quality is felt by the artist when the esthetic image is first conceived in his imagination. The mind in that mysterious instant Shelley likened beautifully to a fading coal. The instant wherein that supreme quality of beauty, the clear radiance of the esthetic image, is apprehended luminously by the mind which has been arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony is the luminous silent stasis of esthetic pleasure, a spiritual state very like to that cardiac condition which the Italian physiologist Luigi Galvani, using a phrase almost as beautiful as Shelley’s, called the enchantment of the heart.”

“The personality of the artist, at first a cry or a cadence or a mood and then a fluid and lambent narrative, finally refines itself out of existence, impersonalizes itself, so to speak. The esthetic image in the dramatic form is life purified in and reprojected from the human imagination. The mystery of esthetic, like that of material creation, is accomplished. The artist, like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.”

“To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life! A wild angel had appeared to him, the angel of mortal youth and beauty, an envoy from the fair courts of life, to throw open before him in an instant of ecstasy the gates of all the ways of error and glory. On and on and on and on!”

“The pigeon-house pleased her. It at once assumed the intimate character of a home, while she herself invested it with a charm which it reflected like a warm glow. There was with her a feeling of having descended in the social scale, with a corresponding sense of having risen in the spiritual. Every step which she took toward relieving herself from obligations added to her strength and expansion as an individual. She began to look with her own eyes; to see and to apprehend the deeper undercurrents of life. No longer was she content to ‘feed upon opinion’ when her own soul had invited her.”

“The Art of Peace begins with you. Work on yourself and your appointed task in the Art of Peace. Everyone has a spirit that can be refined, a body that can be trained in some manner, a suitable path to follow.”

“When you lose your desire for things that do not matter, you will be free.”

“Spiritual disciplines can do nothing. They can only get us to the place where something can be done.”

“A farmer is helpless to grow grain; all he can do is provide the right conditions for the growing of grain. He cultivates the ground, he plants the seed, he waters the plants, and then the natural forces of the earth take over and up comes the grain...This is the way it is with the Spiritual Disciplines - they are a way of sowing to the Spirit... By themselves the Spiritual Disciplines can do nothing; they can only get us to the place where something can be done.”

“I would like to achieve a state of inner spiritual grace from which I could function and give as I was meant to in the eye of God.”

“Of all spiritual disciplines prayer is the most central because it ushers us into perpetual communion with the Father.”

“Life is growth. If we stop growing, technically and spiritually, we are as good as dead.”

“Your spirit is the true shield.”

“You find God the moment you realize that you don’t need to seek God.”

“We are glorious because we are not beings of this world at all. Our spiritual essence is nonmaterial, nonphysical; and when we become aware of this, we are genuinely empowered.”

“Beauty is an internal light, a spiritual radiance that all women have but most women hide, unconsciously denying its existence.”

“Complacency is a deadly foe of all spiritual growth.”

“Healthy shame is the psychological foundation of humility. It is the source of spirituality.”

“O people of the earth, men and women born and made of the elements, but with the spirit of the Divine within you, rise from your sleep of ignorance! Be sober and thoughtful. Realize that your home is not on the earth but in the Light. Why have you delivered yourselves unto death, having power to partake of immortality?”

“The study of the wisdom teachings should be a continuous process in which the teachings become the predominant factor of life rather than the useless and oftentimes negative and illusory thoughts of those who are ignorant of spiritual truths.”

“How happy we would be if we could find the treasure of which the Gospel speaks; all else would be as nothing. As it is boundless, the more you search for it the greater the riches you will find; let us search unceasingly and let us not stop until we have found it.”

“I cannot imagine how religious persons can live satisfied without the practice of the presence of GOD. For my part I keep myself retired with Him in the depth of centre of my soul as much as I can; and while I am so with Him I fear nothing; but the least turning from Him is insupportable.”

“That there needed neither art nor science for going to GOD, but only a heart resolutely determined to apply itself to nothing but Him, or for His sake, and to love Him only.”

“I can’t help but think when we have nothing else, when there are no answers, faith is our greatest ally.”

“Freedom does not come by trying to produce it. Freedom in the spiritual realm comes by an absolute surrender to Jesus and living dependent upon Him.”

“I sat in the sun on a bench; the animal within me licking the chops of memory; the spiritual side a little drowsed, promising subsequent penitence, but not yet moved to begin.”

“I’ve been talking to you for a long time, but today was the first time you could hear it, and all those other times weren’t a waste either. Like little cracks in the wall, one at a time but woven together, they prepared you for today. You have to prepare the soil if you want it to embrace the seed.”

“This is the challenge of creative thinking—as you open the spiritual channels of your mind, God can download divine, creative thoughts into your brain. Ask God to enlarge your capacity for thinking, to take the limits off.”

“Prosperity has little to do with temporal success and more to do with spiritual resilience and the fortitude of the soul.”

″...as all the time I was kneeling with my forehead on the wood in front of me, and was thinking of myself as praying, I was a little ashamed, and I regretted that I was such a rotten Catholic, but realized there was nothing I could do about it, at least for a while and maybe never, but that anyway it was a grand religion, and I only wished I felt religious and maybe I would the next time.”

“My old thoughts about the silt of a billion years covering all this and all cities and generations eventually is just a dumb old thought, ‘Only a silly sober fool could think it, imagine gloating over such nonsense’ (because in one sense the drinker learns wisdom, in the words of Goethe or Blake or whichever it was “The pathway to wisdom lies through excess’) – But in this condition you can only say ‘Wisdom is just another way to make people sick.‘”

“But Cody’s oldfashioned family tiptoe sneak carries that strange apocalyptic burst of gold he somehow always manages to produce, like I said elsewhere the time in Mexico he drove an old car over a rutted road very slowly as we were all high on tea and I saw golden Heaven, or the other times he’s always seemed so golden like as I say in a davenport of some sort in Heaven in the golden top of Heaven.”

“The practice of spirituality involved discovering that which transcends the body, as well as learning how to become attached to that transcendent reality as the truth, rather than remaining attached to the physical body and its desires and impulses, as well as to one’s emotions throughout the ups and downs of human existence.”

“Man is to become God-like through a life of virtue and the cultivation of the spirit through scientific knowledge, practice and bodily discipline.”

“In order for the teachings of mystical spirituality to come true in your life, you must make them the central force in your life. You must center your life around them and infuse them into every aspect of your life.”

“Becoming free from the clutches of ignorance is not as simple as learning about its cause. Even if you are honest and truly believe in the philosophy of yoga and mystical spirituality, all of your mental efforts to negate the ignorance will fail in the beginning.”

“The Self is not known through the study of scriptures, nor through subtlety of the intellect, nor through much learning; but by him who longs for it is it known.”

“Human life is a process in which a human being experiences various situations ranging from pain and suffering to happiness and pleasure between the time span of birth and death”

“If you have developed enough spiritual sensitivity to understand that there is no abiding peace or happiness to be found in ordinary human existence, you are qualified to study the deeper mysteries of spiritual life.”

“There is no reason for a sound faith to be irrational. A useful faith should not be blind, but should be well aware of its grounds. A sound faith should be able to use scientific investigation to strengthen itself. it should be open to the spirit not to lock itself up in the letter. A nourishing, useful, healthful faith should be no obstacle to developing a science of death.”

“A bodily disease, which we look upon as whole and entire within itself, may, after all, be but a symptom of some ailment in the spiritual part.”

“I bow down to and take refuge in the sacred teachings, including the doctrines of the ultimate truth, quiescent and desireless, the irreversible path of the three vehicles, and the transmissions, esoteric instructions, and treatises of the transmitted precepts and treasures.”

“All phenomena are [ultimately] selfless, empty, and free from conceptual elaboration.”

“May we become exactly like you, glorious spiritual teacher! Exactly resembling you in body, retinue, lifespan, fields, and in your supreme and excellent major marks.”

“The Holy Spirit sees the world as a teaching device for bringing you home.”

“Since the beginning of time, spirituality and religion have been called on to fill in the gaps that science did not understand.”

“…a priest of the eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everliving life.”

“Spirituality is recognizing and celebrating that we are all inextricably connected to each other by a power greater than all of us, and that our connection to that power and to one another is grounded in love and compassion.”

“Chris would use the spiritual aspect to try to motivate us. He’d tell us to think about all the evil in the world, all the hatred, and imagine ourselves running against the forces of darkness, the evil wall that was trying to keep us from running our best. He believed that doing well was all mental, a simple matter of harnessing whatever energy was available.”

“To become a happy person have a clean soul, eyes that see romance in the commonplace, a child’s heart, and spiritual simplicity.”

“To become a miracle worker means to take part in a spiritual underground that’s revitalizing the world, participating in a revolution of the world’s values at the deepest possible level.”

“Everyone is on a spiritual path; most people just don’t know it.”

“I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”

“By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept…”

“Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata. Shantih shantih shantih.”

“The closer you get to real matter, rock air fire and wood, boy, the more spiritual the world is.”

“My family is vaguely Anglican, like everyone else, but the truth is that we rarely went to church in India. On Sundays, Mother took me for picnics under hot, cloudless skies. We’d sit on a blanket and listen to the wind whip across dry land, whistling to us. “This is our church,” she’d say combing fingers through my hair.”

“Material poverty, spiritual richness.”

“My goal was not joy but purity, not happiness but beauty, and spirituality.”

“Just as you would exercise faith in a doctor by following his advice to get well physically, by following God’s instructions you can get well emotionally and spiritually.”

“First of all, a soul is not something that you have. It is what you are.”

“True spirituality is a thing of joy and of the earth, and has nothing to do with fake adult dignity. It has nothing to do with long words and sorrowful faces. It has to do with the dance of consciousness that is within you, and with the sense of spiritual adventure that is within your hearts.”

“Colored lights shone right across the northern sky, leaping and flaring, spreading in rainbow hues from horizon to zenith: blood red to rose pink, saffron yellow to delicate primrose, pale green, aquamarine to darkest indigo. Great veils of color swathed the heavens, rising and falling as light seen through cascading curtains of water. Streamers shot out in great shifting beams as if God had put his thumb across the sun.”

“Some things cannot be taught, but they can be awakened in the heart.”

“Spirituality is recognizing the divine light that is within us all.”