Quotes About Spirituality

Introite, nam et heic Dii sunt! (Enter, for here too are gods.)

Spiritual Awakening: The Process A slow change in the way we think, feel, and behave that is done to us, not by us.

man gained direct knowledge of God by losing all awareness of himself. Referring to his title, the author depicts a passive attitude as the way "to cover," or forget, all distractions: "Try to cover these thoughts with a thick cloud of forgetting as though they never existed neither for you nor for any other man. And if they continue to arise, continue to put them down.

He goes on to discuss the element of "dwelling upon" and advises that his readers can develop "special ways, tricks, private techniques, and spiritual devices" in order to achieve contemplation. One means is the use of a single syllable such as "God" or "love":

If you wish to acquire recollection by practicing this holy exercise, remember to make use of a very brief means of ridding yourself of various distracting thoughts. This is that you say "No" to them when they come to you during prayer.

You will know that the Lord will come and enter your soul if the doors, which are your senses, are closed…But you will answer that it would be wrong to say "no" to God and he alone is expected. But God comes in some other way of which you know nothing.

Sit down alone and in silence. Lower your head, shut your eyes, breathe out gently, and imagine yourself looking into your own heart. As you breathe out, say "Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me." Say it, moving your lips gently, or simply say it in your mind. Try to put all other thoughts aside. Be calm, be patient and repeat the process very frequently.

Lord, Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy upon me." Let this be its constant occupation, never to be abandoned. For this work, by keeping the mind free from dreaming, renders it unassailable to suggestions of the enemy and leads it to Divine desire and love….

emblem. The meditator would place his head between his knees and whisper hymns and repeat the name of a magic emblem. Repetition of the magic emblem was used as the object to dwell upon and would chase away distractions and cause the "demons and hostile angels to flight." A state of ecstasy was reached, which Gershom G. Scholem, a scholar of Jewish mysticism, has described as "an attitude of deep self-oblivion.

What I do deny is that you can build any enduring society without some such mystical ethos.

Mathematics transfigures the fortuitous concourse of atoms into the tracery of the finger of God.

You are to be pitied more than I, perhaps. I soar above all your innumerable miseries, partaking of the nature of the angels; for, as you have said, my place is not in your narrow sphere. You have the earth, I have boundless space. Enchained here below by the thousand bonds of your gross, material senses, your spirits cannot plunge into that limpid Ocean of the infinite, where, lost for a day upon your arid shores, my soul drinks deep.

Scientific information about the universe does not displace God. Some have said that they searched the heavens and did not see God. The universe with its measureless spaces remains a vast mystery to us, and those who do not find God in their immediate presence, in their heart and conscience, in the Word and the Christian community, will not find him in the universe either, even though they are equipped with the best telescopes that money can buy.

In infant baptism it was confessed that conversion and regeneration differ, and conversion is ordinarily a coming to consciousness of that new life which has long before been planted in the heart.

The more deeply we live, the more we feel in sympathy with Augustine, and the less with Pelagius.

Philosophy arose out of religion,

Culture, therefore, sinks into the background; man must first become a son of God before he can be, in a genuine sense, a cultured being.

It is supernaturalism, which in point of fact forms the point of controversy between Christianity and many panegyrists of modern culture.

Christian religion cannot abandon this supernaturalism without annihilating itself.

the whole of culture — may be of great value in itself, but whenever it is thrown into the balance against the kingdom of heaven, it loses all its significance.

if the moral law or the ideal good indeed exists outside of us, then it must be grounded in and be one with the Godhead.

Conversion is a turning back to God, but at the same time a coming to one's self.

All religion is supernatural, and rests upon the presupposition that God is distinct from the world and yet works in the world.

No psychology of religion can teach us what conversion is and ought to be; the Scriptures alone can tell us that.