Quotes About Spirituality

As a child, what captivated me was reading the poems myself and realizing that there was a world without material substance which was nevertheless as alive as any other.

God, or the gods, are invisible, quite understandable. But holiness is visible, entirely.

Knowledge has entertained me and it has shaped me and it has failed me. Something in me still starves. In what is probably the most serious inquiry of my life, I have begun to look past reason, past the provable, in other directions. Now I think there is only one subject worth my attention and that is the precognition of the spiritual side of the world and, within this recognition, the condition of my own spiritual state.

Nobody owns the hearts of birds.

there is still somewhere deep within you a beast shouting that the earth is exactly what it wanted— each pond with its blazing lilies is a prayer heard and answered lavishly, every morning, whether or not you have ever dared to be happy, whether or not you have ever dared to pray.

God, rest in my heart and fortify me, take away my hunger for answers

I don't know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, which is what I have been doing all day. Tell me, what else should I have done?

Song of the Builders On a summer morning I sat down on a hillside to think about God— a worthy pastime. Near me, I saw a single cricket; it was moving the grains of the hillside this way and that way. How great was its energy, how humble its effort. Let us hope it will always be like this, each of us going on in our inexplicable ways building the universe.

Of course! the path to heaven doesn't lie down in flat miles. It's in the imagination with which you perceive this world, and the gestures with which you honor it.

About God, how could he give up his secrets and still be God?

For are we not all, at times, exactly like Poe's narrators—beating upon the confining walls of circumstance, the limits of the universe? In spiritual work, with good luck (or grace) we come to accept life's brevity for ourselves. But the lover that is in each of us—the part of us that adores another person—ah! That is another matter.

I know a lot of fancy words. I tear them from my heart and my tongue. Then I pray.

When men sell their souls, where do the souls go?

How God, or the gods, are invisible, quite understandable. But holiness is visible, entirely. It's wonderful to walk along like that, thought not the usual intention to reach an answer but merely drifting.

Why do people keep asking to see God's identity papers when the darkness opening into morning is more than enough? Certainly any god might turn away in disgust. Think of Sheba approaching the kingdom of Solomon. Do you think she had to ask, "Is this the place?

What we love, shapely and pure, is not to be held, but to be believed in.

You can have the other words—chance, luck, coincidence, serendipity. I'll take grace. I don't know what it is exactly, but I'll take it.

maybe death isn't darkness, after all, but so much light wrapping itself around us — as soft as feathers — that we are instantly weary of looking

The moth and the fisheggs are in their place, The suns I see and the suns I cannot see are in their place, The palpable is in its place and the impalpable is in its place.

Every day I'm still looking for God and I'm still finding him everywhere, in the dust, in the flowerbeds. Certainly in the oceans, in the islands that lay in the distance continents of ice, countries of sand each with its own set of creatures and God, by whatever name. How perfect to be aboard a ship with maybe a hundred years still in my pocket. But it's late, for all of us, and in truth the only ship there is is the ship we are all on burning the world as we go.

For me the door to the woods is the door to the temple. Under the trees, along the pale slopes of sand, I walk in an ascendant relationship to rapture, and with words I celebrate this rapture. I see, and dote upon, the manifest.

have wrestled with the angel and I am stained with light and I have no shame.

The words, in the long lines of Leaves of Grass, as near as words can be, are a spiritual and a physical touching.

There is the heaven we enter through institutional grace and there are the yellow finches bathing and singing in the lowly puddle.