Quotes About Spirituality

We approach the divine by enlarging our souls and lighting up our brains.

If the earth needs night as well as day, wouldn't it follow that the soul requires endarkenment to balance enlightenment?

not only is religion divisive and oppressive, it is also a denial of all that is divine in people; it is a suffocation of the soul.

There is a sense in which a painted stick is a stick in bloom. This stick points to the hidden face of God. Sometimes it points to you.

Birth, copulation, and death. Fine. In truth, however, there were at least two other things in which Amanda strongly believed. Namely: magic and freedom.

She thought these thoughts to herself as in her mind's eye she ran naked through the woods, hugging trees.

Ellen Cherry understood then that religion was an improper response to the Divine.

What I love most about Jerusalem is that it's not about money." "Pardon?" "New York here is a city about money. L.A.'s about money. Las Vegas is about money. Dallas the same. Tokyo and London, Milan, Zurich, Singapore, the whole reason for them is money. Tel Aviv's about money. But Jerusalem, it's not about money." "He is absolutely right," put in Abu. "Jerusalem is about . . . something else.

Jerusalem was where it all went down, man. It was connected to heaven like Spanish Harlem was connected to Puerto Rico.

Romantic love is ambulatory by nature, and it must be anchored in strata more stable than lust if it's to last. Marital disintegration is accelerated when only one, or neither, party is grounded and growing, or growing at different rates or in different directions. As I became increasingly interested in cultural matters, matters of the mind and spirit, my teenage bride waxed more and more materialistic.

Little devils wrestled with little angels in the innermost chambers of my conscience. The devils cheated, of course, although where my conscience was concerned they were also more familiar with the terrain.

The accumulation of material things is shallow and vain, but to have a genuine relationship with such things is to have a relationship with life and, by extension, a relationship with the divine.

To practice a religion can be lovely, to believe in one is almost always disastrous.

Kudra had awakened him from a long sleep. No, that was false, he hadn't been asleep at Samye, he had been in a state of heightened awareness, but there is a sense in which awareness can be as stagnating as sloth.

Should a person possess a heart that is as light as a feather, then that person is granted immortality.

There is no death. There are only different levels of life.

The economic world, the world of the equities markets, just seemed like a perfect foil, the ideal backdrop against which to contrast this story about legendary amphibians from outer space, because everything these days is all about money. In this book (Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas) I'm hoping to illustrate that there not only are far more important things than money, but there are far more interesting things. (from NPR Interviews edited by Robert Siegel)

The mystics say that as soon as you give it up, you can have it. That may be true, but who wants it when you don't want it.

Muddy Waters he play in the river Joan Rivers she play in the mud Swami guru play in a big salad bowl Counting lettuce and chewing his cud

a free spirit in the oneness of the whole enchilada, seeing the world -- material and immaterial -- for the all-inclusive miracle it is: not a continuous undifferentiated glob of stuff, mind you, but more like a great spiraling web whose interconnected threads are beaded with pulsing blips that as much as anything else resemble notes of music. I'm all too aware of how woo-woo this sounds, but it was as real

The more we train ourselves to spend time with God and him alone, the more we will discover that God is with us at all times and in all places. Henri Nouwen

can't build the church with any great idea, plan or management. The church is built by Someone else.

I renounce all love except pure philosophical love. The so-called love of human animals removes people two by two from the only possibility of happiness, which is the communion of beautiful souls.

all mystical experience is coincidence; and vice versa, of course.