Quotes About Spirituality

In fact, it is the account of an interior voyage, the kind of excursion that's hard to talk about without sounding foolish or annoyingly serene, or like someone who thinks the Great Spirit has singled him out to be the mouthpiece of ultimate truth. If you knew me you'd know that I am none of the above.

If I look at you"—he pointed to a very old woman who seemed to be teetering in her chair on the far left-hand end of the first row—"and I see not woman, not person, but piece of the energy of God, the same energy that is inside me, how can I hurt you? How can I able to think bad on you? No. You see?" The

I thought I heard a cow mooing in Seese's back yard. Later on, later down the road, as they say, I would learn that this was the sound of the Rinpoche chanting some ancient prayer. But, at that moment, it sounded to me very much like a mooing cow.

There are teachers who say that one of the main obstacles, spiritual obstacles, for westerners is a sense of unworthiness, a self-limiting sense of what's possible for them in a human life.

it occurred to me that the modern spiritual leaders of my tradition were always somber, self-important men, thickly coated in others' idea of who they were supposed to be.

For a climber, saying that you are stopping by Everest is like saying that you are stopping by to see God.

At long last I came to the breakthrough point, the surrender. I realized that her life, and my fury, were truly over. She was gone, and if I really loved her, I owed it to her to ensure that her passing would bear spiritual fruit in my life. For that to happen, I would have to let go. The relief was profound. There was nothing left to do.

To know the universe itself as a road, as many roads, as roads for traveling souls.

Recall how often in human history the saint and the rebel have be the same person. (p. 35)

If you wish to understand the psychological and spiritual temper of any historical period, you can do no better than to look long and searchingly at its art. For in the art the underlying spiritual meaning of the period is expressed directly in symbols.

When a nation, rather, is prey to insupportable economic want and is psychologically and spiritually empty, totalitarianism comes in to fill the vacuum; and the people sell their freedom as a necessity for getting rid of the anxiety which is too great for them to bear any longer.

I know there is a God because in Rwanda I shook hands with the devil. I have seen him, I have smelled him and I have touched him. I know the devil exists and therefore I know there is a God.

Islam calls that 'the roots of heaven' and to the Mexican Indians it is the 'tree of life'--the thing that makes both of them fall on their knees and raise their eyes and beat their tormented breasts. [...] Our needs--for justice, for freedom and dignity--are roots of heaven that are deeply embedded in our hearts, but of heaven itself men know nothing but the gripping roots...

Mathieu didn't know at all what to do about May. He felt a kind of nausea, probably induced by the regular movement of the ball. She was having religious fits again. Jesus Christ, she thought, how many thousands of years will it take people to get over their folklore?

If there is one place on the face of earth where all the dreams of living men have found a home from the very earliest days when man began the dream of existence, it is India!

When I touched her body, I believed she was God. In the curves of her form I found the birth of Man, the creation of the world, and the origin of all life.

She called herself an angel, and wandered the world from girlhood till death. She lived every kind of life and dreamt every kind of dream. She was wild in her wandering, a drop of free water. She believed only in her life, and only in her dreams. She called herself an angel, and her god was Beauty.

Visions from the gods are gifts alone for those who wander.

Asceticism means that a man resolves to live as a man.

and Jesus advanced in wisdom and age and grace with God and men" (Luke 2:52),

In a closer scrutiny of the lives of certain Christians we may be impressed by the discovery of a close connection with a saint. The relationship to the saints is wholesome and fundamentally natural and right. Admittedly, they were only human beings, but they have entered into the mystery of God and the new creation is completed in them. The believer does not seek in them great personalities, but rather God's witnesses in whom God has been fulfilled.

The saints do not live merely in books and pictures but in reality. They love those who are joined with them in Christ; and so from this union of a common love there is no knowing what contacts and relationships may spring.

The Rosary is not a road, but a place, and it has no goal but a depth. To linger in it has great compensations.

But when man confronts the restlessness of his intellect and is caught in the whirl of modern life, he loses all relation to the Rosary.