Quotes About Spirituality

Those who worship God for the hope of gaining, theyre not real worshippers, theyre merchants. Those who worship God out of fear (of punishment), theyre slaves. And those who worship God to be grateful towards their creator, they are the free people, and their worship is a real one.

Her only defence for shifting religious loyalties was that she was very spiritually inclined.

Religion is the call to confront reality to master the self.

It is commonly said and known that each civilization has its own religion. Now my claim is that if we look deeper, the different civilizations were brought into being by the different revelations.

I've spent the last 50 years or so steeping myself in the world's religions, and I've done my homework. I've gone to each of the world's eight great religions and sought out the most profound scholars I could find, and I've apprenticed myself to them and actually practiced each faith.

Might we begin then to transform our passing illuminations into abiding light?

If we take the world's enduring religions at their best, we discover the distilled wisdom of the human race.

We are born in mystery, we live in mystery, and we die in mystery.

Institutions are not pretty. Show me a pretty government. Healing is wonderful, but the American Medical Association? Learning is wonderful, but universities? The same is true for religion... religion is institutionalized spirituality. — Mother Jones November/December 1997.

What a strange fellowship this is, the God seekers in every land, lifting their voices in the most disparate ways imaginable to the God of all life. How does it sound from above? Like bedlam, or do the strains blend in strange ethereal harmony? Does one faith carry the lead or do the parts share in counterpoint and antiphony where not in full throated chorus? We cannot know. All we can do is to listen carefully and with full attention to each voice in turn as it addresses the divine.

Among the languages of American Indians there is no word for 'art,' because for Indians everything is art.

Without attention, the human sense of wonder and the holy will stir occasionally, but to become a steady flame it must be tended.

If your self-worth is based on anything other than your relationship with Christ, you are in big trouble.

For the genuine believer] There are moments in life when God's pursuit of us seems like that of a persistent mosquito, constantly buzzing around our heads and causing us pain, and we are utterly powerless to shake him off.

A temple-centered life, which is nothing less than a God-centered life, is the way to true freedom. The

Freedom from suffering is precisely not the result to be expected from remaining on the vine: on the contrary, fruitful branches are "pruned" just as fruitless ones are cast off (John 15:2, 6). Suffering is a part of every life, but for the Christian it is a "fruitful" part of life, bearing a harvest of righteousness (cf. Heb. 12:11). As

Let Yourselves be carried by God" John of the Cross from "The Impact of God

The Falls of the Tsangpo had offered turn-of-the-century explorers a geographical quest to rival the search for the headwaters of the Nile. But the Tibetans—who knew of it already—did not view the falls as a topographical trophy but as a sacrament, a threshold between the physical universe and the world of the spirit.

As I followed the accounts of Tibetan pilgrims, as well as those of Victorian and Edwardian explorers, Pemako became for me a realm of unbounded possibility, a place where geographical exploration merged with discoveries of the spirit.

There is no hiding the fact that in some ways I am dissatisfied with God.

The moment you fall to your knees in front of a cross, thinking you're praying to some God, you're missing the point. The idea is to look through the symbol to the meaning behind it. Or, as Zen Buddhists put it: "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him." T

I'm not a religious person, and I'm not too interested in being a part of a religion, but I do like having some sort of communal gathering, and having some sense of peoples.

He never looked great but he's dreadful now, face thin and eyes staring like you see in cartoons of mad imams and hunched over. If that's what God does to you you should pick your friends more carefully.

If God truly were inside you, could you bear to look at it? Necdet says.