Quotes About Spirituality

But all the same," insisted the Savage, "it is natural to believe in God when you're alone—quite alone, in the night, thinking about death …" "But people never are alone now," said Mustapha Mond. "We make them hate solitude; and we arrange their lives so that it's almost impossible for them ever to have it.

But God doesn't change." "Men do, though." "What difference does that make?" "All the difference in the world

How does he manifest himself now?" asked the Savage. "Well, he manifests himself as an absence; as though he weren't there at all.

The Quakers pray as the spirit moves them; but to let oneself be moved by the spirit is an arduous business. Kindlier and more worldly churches, with a feeling for human weakness, provide their worshipers with rituals, litanies, beads and prayer wheels.

En el mundo interior no hay en cambio ni trabajo ni monotonía. Lo visitamos únicamente en sueños o en la meditación, y su maravilla es tal que nunca encontramos el mismo mundo en dos sucesivas ocasiones. ¿Cómo puede extrañar entonces que los seres humanos, en su busca de lo divino, hayan preferido

The meditative eye can look through any single object and see, as through a window, the entire cosmos.

A dervish was tempted by the devil to cease calling upon Allah, on the ground that Allah never answered, "Here am I." The Prophet Khadir appeared to him in a vision with a message from God.) Was it not I who summoned thee to my service? Was it not I who made thee busy with my name? Thy calling "Allah!"was my "Here am I." Jalal-uddin Rumi

It is ignorance that causes us to identify ourselves with the body, the ego, the senses, or anything that is not the Atman. He is a wise man who overcomes this ignorance by devotion to the Atman.

As for women, I am perpetually assuring myself that they're the broad highway to divinity

Once, when I was grumbling over being obliged to eat meat and do no penance, I heard it said that sometimes there was more of self-love than desire of penance in such sorrow. St. Teresa

Crass," Dr Robert agreed, "but crass precisely because you're such inadequate materialists. Abstract materialism—that's what you profess. Whereas we make a point of being materialists concretely—materialistic on the wordless levels of seeing and touching and smelling, of tensed muscles and dirty hands. Abstract materialism is as bad as abstract idealism, it makes immediate spiritual experience almost impossible.

God, they will insist, is a spirit and is to be worshipped in spirit. Therefore an experience which is chemically conditioned cannot be an experience of the divine. But, in one way or another, all our experiences are chemically conditioned, and if we imagine that some of them are purely 'spiritual', purely 'intellectual', purely 'aesthetic', it is merely because we have never troubled to investigate the internal chemical environment at the moment of their occurrence.

man's obsessive consciousness of, and insistence on being, a separate self is the final and most formidable obstacle to the unitive knowledge of God.

Holiness, on the contrary, is the total denial of the separative self, in its creditable no less than its discreditable aspects, and the abandonment of the will to God.

To the extent that there is attachment to 'I,' 'me,' 'mine,' there is no attachment to, and therefore no unitive knowledge of, the divine Ground.

Mortification has to be carried to the pitch of non-attachment or (in the phrase of St. Fran$ois de Sales) 'holy indifference'; otherwise it merely transfers self-will from one channel to another, not merely without decrease in the total volume of that self-will, but sometimes with an actual increase.

But all the same," insisted the Savage, "it is natural to believe in God when you're alone—quite alone, in the night, thinking about death…

But God doesn't change. Men do, though. What difference does that make? All the difference in the world.

And what, we may ask, are these devout and well-behaved Peyotists experiencing? Not the mild sense of virtue which sustains the average Sunday churchgoer through ninety minutes of boredom.

Volt valami, amit kereszténységnek hívtak, mint már említettem (…) Az alulfogyasztás etikája és filozófiája…

Man cannot live by bread alone; but if he chooses to nourish his mind on the wrong kind of spiritual food, he won't even get bread. He won't even get bread, because he'll be so busy killing or preparing to kill his neighbours in the name of God, or Country, or Social Justice that he won't be able to cultivate his fields.

Sólo podéis ser independientes de Dios mientras conservéis la juventud y la prosperidad; la independencia no os llevará a salvo hasta el final.

Mescalin opens up the way of Mary, but shuts the door on that Martha. It gives access to contemplation - but to a conteplation that is incompatible with action and even with will to action, the very thought of action...

The mystical experience is doubly valuable; it is valuable because it gives the experiencer a better understanding of himself and the world and because it may help him to lead a less self-centered and more creative life.