Quotes About Spirituality

Like not a few of those seduced by the wild, McCandless seems to have been driven by a variety of lust that supplanted sexual desire. His yearning, in a sense, was too pow¬erful to be quenched by human contact. McCandless may have been tempted by the succor offered by women, but it paled beside the prospect of rough congress with nature, with the cosmos it¬self

And then I found myself atop a slender wedge of ice, adorned with a discarded oxygen cylinder and a battered aluminum survey pole, with nowhere higher to climb. A string of Buddhist prayer flags snapped furiously in the wind. Far below, down a side of the mountain I had never laid eyes on, the dry Tibetan plateau stretched to the horizon as a boundless expanse of dun-colored earth.

escape the cycle of birth and rebirth and transcend forever this world of pain and suffering.

In the morning he called together five trusted Mormon leaders and, "with broken spirit," informed them that God had revealed to him the necessity of relinquishing "the practice of that principle for which the brethren had been willing to lay down their lives." To the shock and utter horror of the other men in the room, President Woodruff explained that "it was the will of the Lord" that the church stop sanctioning the doctrine of plural marriage.

Despite the cordial exchange in Judge Hansen's court, by 1995 Dan had come to believe that Ron was a "child of the devil"—an agent of Satan who was bound and determined to kill Dan in order to prevent him from fulfilling the rest of the vital mission God has given Dan to carry out.

All religious belief is a function of nonrational faith.

Mr. Lincoln had no faith and no hope in the usual acceptation of those words," Mary Lincoln recalled. "He never joined a Church; but still, as I believe, he was a religious man by nature.

mother. "Some men call it conscience," she replied, "but I prefer to call it the voice of God in the soul of man. If you listen and obey it, then it will speak clearer and clearer, and always guide you right, but if you turn a deaf ear and disobey it will fade out little by little, and leave you all in the dark and without a guide." He never forgot the conversation, or its implications.

Someone made the point somewhere that we must learn to distinguish between the occult and the religious, between magic and true spirituality. The two do sometimes come together--saints do have magical powers, sure, But they don't exploit these powers, and more important, they consider them only by-products of their real concern, which is spiritual development.

I am fifty-five years old, and believe God is willing to listen if we speak clearly and to the point. His responses are manifested, not in immediate answers or results, but in dots everywhere around us that need to be connected intelligently.

Of all the knowledge that we can ever obtain, the knowledge of God, and the knowledge of ourselves, are the most important.

He that has doctrinal knowledge and speculation only, without affection, never is engaged in the business of religion.

Seek not to grow in knowledge chiefly for the sake of applause, and to enable you to dispute with others; but seek it for the benefit of your souls.

Nothing sets a Christian so much out of the devil's reach than humility.

Yes, but that's because you're not poor. When you're poor, things just happen to you. You feel like you can't control anything. You're completely at God's mercy. That's why Jesus tells us that the poor are blessed—because having nothing brings you closer to God." "That woman didn't strike me as being especially close to God.

Her house was the heavy (but not indefinitely heavy) and sturdy (but not everlasting) God that she'd loved and served and been sustained by.

I don't think I'm any different than any woman. I mean, any woman who hasn't had her mind fucked up by male religion.

religion, too, which is another big drug for people who don't have economic opportunity

It's approximately the same if you're a Jew," the rabbi said, "although we tend to emphasize that you're a Jew whether you like it or not. It's more a matter of God tracking you down than of you finding God.

For a Catholic, guilt was more than just a feeling. It was the inescapable consequence of sin. It was an objective thing, plainly visible to God.

You didn't have to write to be a poet, you didn't have to create things to be an artist. Her mother's spiritual Endeavor was itself a kind of art—an art of invisibility.

Every man seeking salvation had a signature weakness to remind him of his nullity before the Lord and complicate communion with Him.

simply by trying to speak honestly, surrendering to emotion, supporting other people in their honesty and emotion, she experienced her first glimmerings of spirituality.

While man experienced time as a progression, from unknown past to unknowable future, to God the entire course of history was eternally present