Quotes About Spirituality

We create our gods based on the stage of development we are at in matters of ethics, morals and spirituality.

He was of the Old Religion, like nearly all Mackenzies, and wouldn't object to a Catholic ceremony - his faith taught that all paths to the Divine were valid. Christians tended to be a little more exclusive.

Rouse thee, my fainting soul, and play the man; And through such waning span Of life and thought as still has to be trod, Prepare to meet thy God. And while the storm of that bewilderment Is for a season spent, And, ere afresh the ruin on me fall, Use well the interval.

Novissima hora est; and I fain would sleep. The pain has weaned me ... Into Thy hands, O Lord, into Thy hands ...

Let nothing perturb you, nothing frighten you. All things pass. God does not change. Patience achieves everything.

An iceberg is water striving to be land; a mountain, especially a Himalaya, especially Everest, is land's attempt to metamorphose into sky; it is grounded in flight, the earth mutated--nearly--into air, and become, in the true sense, exalted. Long before she ever encountered the mountain, Allie was aware of its brooding presence in her soul.

You will see, as time goes by, said Ibn Rushd, that in the end it will be religion that will make men turn away from God. The godly are God's worst advocates.

I allowed myself the supernatural, the transcendent, because, I told myself, our love of metaphor is pre-religious, born of our need to express what is inexpressible, our dreams of otherness, of more.

He knew that his father had finally run hard enough and long enough to wear down the frontiers between the worlds, he had run clear out of his skin and into the arms of his wife, to whom he had proved, once and for all, the superiority of his love. Some migrants are happy to depart.

one could accept Muhammad as a genuine mystic—just as one could accept Joan of Arc's voices as having genuinely been heard by her, or the revelations of Saint John the Divine as being that troubled soul's 'real' experiences—without needing also to accept that, had one been standing next to the Prophet of Islam on Mount Hira that day, one would also have seen the Archangel.

It is hard for a person of no faith like myself to comprehend the moment when faith dies in the human heart. The kneeling believer who suddenly understands that there is no reason to pray because nobody's listening.

How to dispense with Padma? How give up her ignorance and superstition, necessary counterweights to my miracle-laden omniscience? How to do without her paradoxical earthiness of spirit, which keeps—kept!—my feet on the ground? I have become, it seems to me, the apex of an isosceles triangle, supported equally by twin deities, the wild god of memory and the lotus-goddess of the present … but must I now become reconciled to the narrow one-dimensionality of a straight line?

To be born again, sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, first you have to die.

Human beings who turn away from God lose love, and certainty

I am being flayed,' he told her in his dream. 'It is my holy calling. We will never gain our humanity until we lose our skins.

Amikor az ember a lehetetlenre vállalkozik, mindennap a halállal utazik, megtisztulásnak, a lélek felemelkedésének fogadja el az utazást, s így az út nem az istenek megnevezése, hanem maga Isten felé tart.

Ez az istenimádat-dolog, az énnek e megtagadása a Mindenható színe elÅ'tt csak figyelemelterelés, hamis nyom. Akárhol rejlik is a jóság, semmikép nem egy istenségnek szóló szertartásos, gondolkodás nélküli tiszteletadásban, hanem inkább az egyéni vagy közös út lassú, esetlen, hibákkal tarkított keresésében.

If he believed in souls he would have said she had a good one.

A kernel of truth lurks at the heart of religion, because spiritual experience, ethical behavior, and strong communities are essential for human happiness. And yet our religious traditions are intellectually defunct and politically ruinous. While spiritual experience is clearly a natural propensity of the human mind, we need not believe anything on insufficient evidence to actualize it.

I]t is difficult to imagine a set of beliefs more suggestive of mental illness than those that lie at the heart of many of our religious traditions.

Spirituality must be distinguished from religion—because people of every faith, and of none, have had the same sorts of spiritual experiences.

In fact, we can directly experience that consciousness is never improved or harmed by what it knows. Making this discovery, again and again, is the basis of spiritual life.

What one believes happens after death dictates much of what one believes about life, and this is why faith-based religion, in presuming to fill in the blanks in our knowledge of the hereafter, does such heavy lifting for those who fall under its power. A single proposition – you will not die – once believed, determines a response to life that would be otherwise unthinkable.

Religious moderation, insofar as it represents an attempt to hold on to what is still serviceable in orthodox religion, closes the door to more sophisticated approaches to spirituality, ethics, and the building of strong communities. Religious moderates seem to believe that what we need is not radical insight and innovation in these areas but a mere dilution of Iron Age philosophy.