Quotes About Spirituality

The divine communicates to us primarily through the language of the natural world. Not to hear the natural world is not to hear the divine.

An idle life and a holy heart is a contradiction.

The power of religion and godliness lives, thrives, or dies, as closet prayer lives, thrives, or dies. Godliness never rises to a higher pitch than when men keep closest to their closets, etc.

Had many men spent but half that time in secret prayer, that they have spent in seeking after the philosopher's stone, how happy might they have been!

It was a precept of Pythagoras, that when we enter into the temple to worship God , we must not so much as speak or think of any worldly business, lest we make God's service an idle ,perfunctory, and lazy recreation. The same I may say of closet prayer.

When a man hath begun to sin, he knews not where, or when, or how he shall make a stop of sin. Usually the soul goes on from evil to evil, from folly to folly, till it be ripe for eternal misery. Men usually grow from being naught to be very naught, and from very naught to be stark naught, and then God sets them at nought forever.

The sluggish Christian will be sleeping, or idling, or trifling, when he should be in his closet a-praying. Sloth is the green-sickness of the soul; get it cured, or it will be your eternal bane. Of all devils, it is the idle devil that keeps men most out of their closets. There is nothing that gives the devil so much advantage against us as idleness.

My child, Because you think you are the body, For a long time you have been bound. Know you are pure awareness. With this knowledge as your sword Cut through your chains. And be happy! For you are already free, Without action or flaw, Luminous and bright.

God's holiness is not an unloving holiness, and God's love is not an unholy love. It is only by keeping these two primary moral qualities of the divine being closely related that we may rightly behold the character of God. (p. 98)

Faith itself is an act of human willing enabled and disciplined by grace.

The study of God requires intellectual effort, historical imagination, empathic energy, and participation in a vital community of prayer (Augustine, Answer to Skeptics).

re: the green martyrs] But the saintly recluse does not intend to wall himself off from holy intercourse with his fellow humans. A little out of the way, he will still be available to those who walk the extra mile to find insight, instruction, and baptism.

Twas God the Word that spake it, He took the Bread and brake it; And what the Word did make it That I believe, and take it.

We need not fear God as we fear all other suffering, which burns and maims and kills. For God's fire, though it will perfect us, will not destroy, for 'the bush was not consumed.

I don't--know about ghosts, but I do know that our souls can be made to go outside our bodies when we are alive... A very easy way to feel 'em go is to lie on the grass at night, and look straight up at some big bright star; and by fixing your mind upon it you will soon find that you are hundreds and hundreds o' miles away from your body, which you don't seem to want at all.

God was palpably present in the country, and the devil had gone with the world to town.

Cultivate the art of renunciation.

He might fast and pray during the whole interval, but the human was more powerful in him than the Divine.

Poi si faceva più chiaro, e i suoi lineamenti diventavano semplicemente femminili, cambiandosi da quelli di una divinità capace di dare la beatitudine in quelli di un essere che agognava di possederla

I've been troubled with weak moments lately, 'tis true. I've been drinky once this month already, and I did not go to church a-Sunday, and I dropped a curse or two yesterday; so I don't want to go too far for my safety. Your next world is your next world, and not to be squandered offhand. I

Music drew an angel down, said the poet: but what is that to drawing down worlds!

pues gozan los pastores, en común con los marinos, del privilegio de saber llamar a Dios en lugar de esperarlo.

And then he realized that he loved the eagle better than the sheep and that he always would and that, because he did, because it was in him to do it, he could never be perfect in the sight of God.

I thank God for what happened," Verger said. "It was my salvation. Have you accepted Jesus, Miss Starling? Do you have faith?