Quotes About Spirituality

Whenever we mentally compartmentalize our work away from our more creative or more spiritual being, we construct a false dichotomy. This schism has to collapse on the level of universal interdependence. If your week and life are segregated this way, you're going to cause suffering—at the very least for yourself. You'll guiltily and resentfully acquiesce to your place in the world.

If we are going to conquer materialism, we have to make the heartmind into a place in which the full range of human emotions can feel at home.

Ik zou een héél boek willen schrijven over een kiezelsteen en over een paars viooltje. Ik zou met één enkele kiezelsteen heel lang kunnen leven en een gevoel kunnen hebben in Gods machtige natuur te leven.

Es gibt Augenblicke, in denen ich mich wie ein kleiner Vogel in einer großen schützenden Hand geborgen fühle. Gestern war mein Herz ein in der Falle gefangener Vogel. Jetzt ist der Vogel wieder frei und fliegt ungehindert über alles hinweg. Heute scheint die Sonne. Und jetzt packe ich mein Brot ein und mache mich auf den Weg.

I shall try to help You, God, to stop my strength ebbing away, though I cannot vouch for it in advance. But one thing is becoming increasingly clear to me: that You cannot help us, that we must help You to help ourselves.

Oh, Lord, let me feel at one with myself. Let me perform a thousand daily tasks with love, but let every one spring from a greater central core of devotion and love.

Oh God, I thank You for having created me as I am. I thank You for the sense of fulfillment I sometimes have; that fulfillment is after all nothing but being filled with You. I promise You to strive my whole life long for beauty and harmony and also humility and true love, whispers of which I hear inside me during my best moments.

I know the intimate gestures he uses with women, but I still want to know the gestures he uses with God.

So let this be the aim of the meditation: to turn one's innermost being into a vast empty plain, with none of that treacherous undergrowth to impede the view. So that something of 'God' can enter you, and something of 'Love', too.

We live in a vastly complex society which has been able to provide us with a multitude of material things, and this is good, but people are beginning to suspect we have paid a high spiritual price for our plenty.

penetrating into the spirit of the Great Doctrine.

I know God has been found by unusual people in unusual places--in a sudden vision in a grove or orchard or grotto, or on a mountain or in a closet, or through saintly service to African lepers or to Calcutta untouchables. But for most of us, most of the time, I am convinced he can be found most surely in 'the natural sequence to the performance' of the duties he has given us that all of us (not just the unusual) can perform in our own homes and neighborhoods.

Prayers are tools not for doing or getting, but for being and becoming.

Self is the soul minus God.

The huge irony is that the more the gospel is offered in consumer terms, the more the consumers are disappointed.

My identity does not begin when I begin to understand myself. There is something previous to what I think about myself, and it is what God thinks of me. That means that everything I think and feel is by nature a response, and the one to whom I respond is God. I never speak the first word. I never make the first move.

Prayer is a refusal to live as an outsider to my God and my own soul.

I want my prayers, and the prayers of my friends, to ricochet off the rock faces of mountains, reverberate down the corridors of shopping malls, sound ocean deeps, water arid deserts, find a foothold in fetid swamps, encounter poets as they search for the accurate word, mingle their fragrance with wildflowers in Alpine Meadows, sing with the looms of Canadian lakes.

The assumption of spirituality is that always God is doing something before I know it. So the task is not to get God to do something I think needs to be done, but to become aware of what God is doing so that I can respond to it and participate and take delight in it. When

Church is the textured context in which we grow up in Christ to maturity. But church is difficult. Sooner or later, though, if we are serious about growing up in Christ, we have to deal with church. I say sooner.

Don't love the world's ways. Don't love the world's goods. Love of the world squeezes out love for the Father. Practically everything that goes on in the world—wanting your own way, wanting everything for yourself, wanting to appear important—has nothing to do with the Father. It just isolates you from him. The world and all its wanting, wanting, wanting is on the way out—but whoever does what God wants is set for eternity.

Action without prayer thins out into something very exterior. A prayerless life can result in effective action and accomplish magnificent things, but if there is no developed interiority, the action never enters into the depth and intimacy of relationships.

We can decide to live in response to the abundance of God and not under the dictatorship of our own poor needs.

James 5:16 - The prayer of a person living right with God is something powerful to be reckoned with.