Quotes About Spirituality

Moving Forward The deep parts of my life pour onward, as if the river shores were opening out. It seems that things are more like me now, that I can see farther into paintings. I feel closer to what language can't reach. With my sense, as with birds, I climb into the windy heaven, out of the oak, and in the ponds broken off from the sky my feeling sinks, as if standing on fishes.

À travers nous s'envolent Les oiseaux en silence. O, moi qui veux grandir Je regarde au dehors, et l'arbre en moi grandit.

I come home from the soaring In which I lost myself. I was song, and the refrain which is God Is still roaring in my ears.

You know that I am not one of those individuals who neglect their body in order to turn it into an offering for their soul; my soul would not at all have appreciated such a sacrifice.

Perform no miracles for me, But justify Thy laws to me Which, as the years pass by me. All soundlessly unfold.

Be out of sync with your times for just one day, and you will see how much eternity you contain within you. (Letters on Life)

Temples are no longer known. It is we who secretly save up these extravagances of the heart. Where one of them still survives, a Thing that was formerly prayed to, worshipped, knelt before-- just as it is, it passes into the invisible world. Many no longer perceive it, yet miss the chance to build it inside themselves now, with pillars and statues: greater.

Through love and through death, our innate ability to transform the loss of control is activated to bring forth a deeper awareness of life.

Doch wie ich mich auch in mich selber neige: Mein Gott ist dunkel und wie ein Gewebe von hundert Wurzeln, welche schweigsam trinken.

I am able more and more to make use of that long patience you have taught me by your tenacious example; that patience which, disproportionate to ordinary life which seems to bid us haste, puts us in touch with all that surpasses us.

I find you, Lord, in all Things and in all my fellow creatures, pulsing with your life; as a tiny seed you sleep in what is small and in the vast you vastly yield yourself. The wondrous game that power plays with Things is to move in such submission through the world: groping in roots and growing thick in trunks and in treetops like a rising from the dead.

I have my dead and I have let them go and been surprised, to see them so consoled, so soon at home in death, just right this way, so unlike what we hear. Only you, you come back; you brush against me, you move about, you want to knock into things, to make them sound of you, telling me you're here. Oh don't take away what I'm slowly learning.

A un Dio è concesso. Ma dimmi come può seguirlo un uomo varcando la sottile lira?

I am learning to see. Why, I cannot say, but all things enter more deeply into me; nor do the impressions remain at the level where they used to cease. There is a place within me of which I knew nothing. Now all things tend that way. I do not know what happens there.

You see, I want a lot. Maybe I want it all: the darkness of each endless fall, the shimmering light of each ascent. — Rainer Maria Rilke, from "Du Siehst, ich will viel," Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God , trans. Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy (Riverhead Books, 1996)

Ich finde dich in allen diesen Dingen,] Ich finde dich in allen diesen Dingen, denen ich gut und wie ein Bruder bin; als Samen sonnst du dich in den geringen und in den großen giebst du groß dich hin. Das ist das wundersame Spiel der Kräfte, daß sie so dienend durch die Dinge gehn: in Wurzeln wachsend, schwindend in die Schäfte und in den Wipfeln wie ein Auferstehn.

love then is what my hands attempt to grasp because I want to say a prayer whose sounds my burning mouth, my lips, cannot bring forth … (Franz Kappus)

All strength we give away comes over us again, experienced and altered. Thus it is in prayer. And what is there, truly done, that is not prayer?

Ask yourself, dear Mr. Kappus, whether you really have lost God? Is it not rather, that you have never yet possessed him? For when should that have been? Do you not believe that a child can hold him, him whom men bear only with effort and whose weight compresses the old? Do you believe that anyone who really has him could lose him like a little stone, or do you not think rather that whoever had him could only be lost by him?

There is only one way; Go within.

Ich lebe mein Leben in wachsenden Ringen, die sich über die Dinge ziehn. Ich werde den letzten vielleicht nicht vollbringen, aber versuchen will ich ihn. Ich kreise um Gott, um den uralten Turm, und ich kreise jahrtausendelang; und ich weiß noch nicht: bin ich ein Falke, ein Sturm oder ein großer Gesang.

I don't want to think a place for you. Speak to me from everywhere. Your Gospel can be comprehended without looking for its source. When I go toward you it is with my whole life.

She was brought up in the reformed Protestant Church but left it at the age of seventeen in protest against its restrictive rules.

Ich habe Hymnen, die ich schweige.