Quotes About Spirituality

Collect yourself in His presence with the one purpose and intent of loving Him. Come to Him as one who is giving himself to God. Behold Him in the most inward recess of your spirit that you can find.

I dug out the pre-Reformation and Reformation classics written on the subject of Christian spirituality. Virtually every one of those books addressed one subject: prayer.

In all the world there was only one thing I knew about a spiritual pursuit. It was this: become quiet. Still your mind before the Lord. Do that before you do anything else.

If you want to dwell in the Buddha way And gain natural wisdom, You should always be diligent about making offerings To those who receive and embrace the Dharma Flower.

By cutting off pride and arrogance, He has acquired such a glorious body.

Medicine King, after the extinction of the Tathagata, if there are good sons or good daughters who want to teach this Dharma Flower Sutra for the four groups, how should they teach it? Such good sons or good daughters should enter the room of the Tathagata, put on the robe of the Tathagata, sit on the seat of the Tathagata, and then teach this sutra everywhere for the four groups.

Even if someone were to give a three-thousand great thousandfold world full of the seven precious materials as an offering to the Buddha, great bodhisattvas, pratyekabuddhas, and arhats, the blessings such a person would gain would not equal those of someone who receives and embraces even a single four-line verse of this Dharma Flower Sutra. Happiness greater than this won't be found.

I think people often come to the synagogue, mosque, the church looking for God, and what we give them is religion.

It seems to me, then, that vulnerability and self-disclosure are at the heart of what we understand about the nature of God. And the reason I believe gay and lesbian people are spiritual people is that we too have participated in vulnerability and self-disclosure, especially in the process of coming-out. When someone shares with you who they really, really are, it is a special offering. To do so when it risks rejection is a profound, holy gift.

I never thought of it as God. I didn't know what to call it. I don't believe in devils, but demons I do because everyone at one time or another has some kind of a demon, even if you call it by another name, that drives them.

It's never been true, not anywhere at any time, that the value of a soul, of a human spirit, is dependent on a number on a scale. We are unrepeatable beings of light and space and water who need these physical vehicles to get around. When we start defining ourselves by that which can be measured or weighed, something deep within us rebels. We don't want to EAT hot fudge sundaes as much as we want our lives to BE hot fudge sundaes. We want to come home to ourselves. (p. 174-5)

At some point, it's time to stop fighting with death, my thighs and the way things are. And to realize that emotional eating in nothing but bolting from multiple versions of the above: the obsession will stop when the bolting stops. And at that point, we might answer, as spiritual teacher Catherine Ingram did, when someone asked how she allowed herself to tolerate deep sorrow, "I live among the brokenhearted. They allow it.

La tsédaka n'est pas qu'un simple principe de générosité. C'est non seulement un vrai projet messianique pour le monde, un bouleversement, mais également une règle à suivre quotidiennement, une discipline personnelle qui, comme toute chose dans notre tradition, est expliqué dans les moindres détails. Ensemble (extrait du mot de la fin, par Yeshaya Dalsace, Rabbin de la communauté Maayane Or, Nice)

Dig -- the mostly uncouth -- language of grace.

To feel the right emotions is fully as important as to hold the right ideas, and the great service of religion is the development of the right emotions.

Faith is an act whereby they learn their God.

They want explanation, not faith; God gives them faith as the explanation.

When their minds mingle with His magnanimity, something of eternity rubs off on their imaginations.

Their guilt plus their repentance should have equalled forgiveness. But they don't feel forgiven, so they failed, which makes them feel guilty, which was why they repented in the first place, so they're stuck right where they started: Guilty.

God didn't give Moses ten fortune cookies in a to-go box. God didn't lead the Israelites through the wilderness with a neon all-you-can-eat sign. And God doesn't speak to people in bathrooms, public or otherwise.

Why not have a God in your back pocket for when you need Him? That's all most of them mean by 'Christian.

Most of them don't mind too much the idea of a God existing somewhere, just so long as He's indulgent.

They forget that for a Creator to create, He must be greater than His creation, thus He must be by definition not less than emotional.

The eye is to light as the soul is to God.