Quotes About Spirituality

Often in the summer, as I go to or come from the vestry, I sit down for a moment on the turf that covers my old friend Rodgers, and think that this body of mine is everyday moldering away, til it shall fall a heap of dust into it's appointed place. But what is that to me? It is to me the drawing nigh of the fresh morning of life when I shall be young and strong again, glad in the presence of the wise and beloved dead, and unspeakably glad in the presence of God.

When some pray, they lift heavy thoughts from the ground, only to drop them on it again; others send up their prayers in living shapes, this or that, the nearest likeness to each. All live things were thoughts to begin with, and are fit therefore to be used by those that think. When one says to the great Thinker:—'Here is one of thy thoughts: I am thinking it now!' that is a prayer—a word to the big heart from one of its own little hearts.

The necessary unlikeness between the creator and the created holds within it the equally necessary likeness of the thing made to him who makes it, and so of the work of the made to the work of the maker... The imagination of man is made in the image of the imagination of God.

The very fact that anything can die, implies the existence of something that cannot die; which must either take to itself another form, as when the seed that is sown dies, and arises again; or, in conscious existence, may, perhaps, continue to lead a purely spiritual life.

God is God to us not that we may say he is, but that we may know him; and when we know him, then we are with him, at home, at the heart of the universe, the heirs of all things.

There can hardly be a plainer proof of the lowness of our nature, until we have laid hold of the higher nature that belongs to us by birthright, than this, that even a just anger tends to make us unjust and unkind.

Suddenly pressing both hands on her heart, she fell to the ground, and the mist rose from her and melted in the air. I ran to her. But she began to writhe in such torture that I stood aghast. A moment more and her legs, hurrying from her body, sped away serpents. From her shoulders fled her arms as in terror, serpents also. Then something flew up from her like a bat, and when I looked again, she was gone.

Complaint against God is far nearer to God than indifference about Him.

I need a God; and if there be none how did I come to need one?

The question is not at present, however, of removing mountains, a thing that will one day be simple to us, but of waking and rising from the dead now.

he believed in God and he believed that when the human is still, the Divine speaks to it, because it is its own.

Jesus tells us we must leave the self altogether-yield it, deny it, refuse it, lose it. Thus only shall we save it.... The self is given us that we may sacrifice it. It is ours in order that we, like Christ, may have something to offer- not that we should torment it, but that we should deny it; not that we should cross it, but that we should abandon it utterly.

Let us then arise and live—arise even in the darkest moments of spiritual stupidity, when hope itself sees nothing to hope for. Let us go at once to the Life. Let us comfort ourselves in the thought of the Father and the Son.

O Lord, I have been talking to the people; Thought's wheels have round me whirled a fiery zone And the recoil of my word's airy ripple My heart unheedful has puffed up and blown. Therefore I cast myself before thee prone: Lay cool hands on my burning brain and press From my weak heart the swelling emptiness.

The kingdom of heaven is not come, even when God's will is our law: it is come when God's will is our will.

At length, one lovely morning, when the green corn lay soaking in the yellow sunlight, and the sky rose above the earth deep and pure and tender like the thought of God about it, Alec became suddenly aware that life was good, and the world beautiful . . . One of God's lyric prophets, the larks, was within earshot, pouring down a vocal summer of jubilant melody. The lark thought nobody was listening but his wife; but God heard in heaven, and the young prodigal heard on the earth.

Spiritual Murder It may be an infinitely less evil to murder a man than to refuse to forgive him. The former may be the act of a moment of passion: the latter is the heart's choice. It is spiritual murder, the worst, to hate, to brood over the feeling that excludes, that, in our microcosm, kills the image, the idea of the hated.

For the master believed in solitude and silence. Say rather, he believed in God. What the youth might think, feel, or judge, he could not tell; but he believed that when the Human is still, the Divine speaks to it, because it is its own.

My prayers, my God, flow from what I am not; I think thy answers make me what I am. Like weary waves thought follows upon thought, But the still depth beneath is all thine own, And there thou mov'st in paths to us unknown.

There is one kind of religion in which the more devoted a man is, the fewer proselytes he makes: the worship of himself.

A man may sink by such slow degrees that, long after he is a devil, he may go on being a good churchman or a good dissenter and thinking himself a good Christian.

It is always the way. Until a man knows God, he seeks to obey him by doing things he neither commands nor cares about;

Who knows what harm may be done to a man by hurrying a spiritual process in him?

she had now no inclination to trouble Gibbie's heart with what men call the plan of salvation. It was enough to her to find that he followed her Master. Being in the light she understood the light, and had no need of system, either true or false, to explain it to her.