Quotes About Spirituality

If people can't satisfy their need for deep connection in other ways, they'll be more receptive to a smooth-talking leader who urges them to renounce their lives of "selfish momentary pleasure" and follow him onward to "that purely spiritual existence" in which their value as human beings consists.

The god Krishna says: I love the man who hates not nor exults, who mourns not nor desires … who is the same to friend and foe, [the same] whether he be respected or despised, the same in heat and cold, in pleasure and in pain, who has put away attachment and remains unmoved by praise or blame … contented with whatever comes his way.33

If you think about religion as a set of beliefs about supernatural agents, you're bound to misunderstand it.

You've got to look at the ways that religious beliefs work with religious practices to create a religious community.11 Believing, doing, and belonging are three complementary yet distinct aspects of religiosity

Whether it is called nobility, virtue, or divinity, and whether or not God exists, people simply do perceive sacredness, holiness, or some ineffable goodness in others, and in nature.

Rather, my research on the moral emotions has led me to conclude that the human mind simply does perceive divinity and sacredness, whether or not God exists.

Liberals sometimes say that religious conservatives are sexual prudes for whom anything other than missionary-position intercourse within marriage is a sin. But conservatives can just as well make fun of liberal struggles to choose a balanced breakfast—balanced among moral concerns about free-range eggs, fair-trade coffee, naturalness, and a variety of toxins, some of which (such as genetically modified corn and soybeans) pose a greater threat spiritually than biologically.

Even atheists have intimations of sacredness, particularly when in love or in nature. We just don't infer that God caused those feelings.

We took such an infinitesimal amount of psilocybin, and yet it connected me to infinity.

If we had no sense of disgust, I believe we would also have no sense of the sacred.

A college football game is a superb analogy for religion.

The ethic of divinity is based on the idea that people are, first and foremost, temporary vessels within which a divine soul has been implanted.12 People are not just animals with an extra serving of consciousness; they are children of God and should behave accordingly.

In the ethic of divinity, there is an order to the universe, and things (as well as people) should be treated with the reverence or disgust that they deserve.

The ethic of divinity lets us give voice to inchoate feelings of elevation and degradation—our sense of "higher" and "lower." It gives us a way to condemn crass consumerism and mindless or trivialized sexuality.

Practice and playing music has to be like a religious experience. It has to be your religion, you know; it has to be your trance. You get something from a devotion to it and digging deeper into yourself and the nature of reality.

O Great Swami of the East, your wisdom has pierced the miasma.

Maybe still waters did run deep. Or God on your side was the ultimate soul balm.

One of the ways over the years that the church has severely weakened corporate prayer is that we let prayer be about the people there, rather than about God. We

Two errors, wrote Pascal, a thinker Andrew once admired. One: to take everything literally. Two: to take everything spiritually.

The purpose of Christian doctrine is not merely to make us more knowledgeable but to make us more mature as followers of Jesus Christ, to make us more like him.

The fact that I have these people whom I'm emotionally and spiritually accountable to really helps prevent that. I tell them what's going on in my life, and they tell me, and I feel like

Nothing in the "Letter," nothing in the bedlam of Birmingham or its bittersweet aftermath, suggest that King viewed America as a providential nation whose destiny was freedom. Rather, that exceptional nation first had to be created by the exceptionally brave and spiritual people of the civil rights movement.

Neither arms nor armor can deliver Corenwald—only the arm of the One God.

Aidan laughed for the joy of the frog orchids. He cried, too, for their beauty. His melancholy was cured. And a prayer was answered that he hadn't been able to pray.