Quotes About Spiritualism

Spiritualism provided an important audience for radical reform and a source of affirmation for embattled radical leaders. In their zeal for "self-ownership," Spiritualists advocated a broad woman's rights program, combating every disability imposed by church, state, or social convention.

I even spent a certain amount of time worrying about the Spiritualist doctrines: If The Other Side was so wonderful, why did the spirits devote most of their messages to warnings? Instead of telling their loved ones to avoid slippery stairs and unsafe cars and starchy foods, they should have been luring them over cliffs and bridges and into lakes, spurring them on to greater feats of intemperance and gluttony, in order to hasten their passage to the brighter shore.

Houdini, the magician who debunked magic, could not bear to see the great rationalist [Arthur Conan] Doyle enchanted by ghosts and frauds. And so he did what any friend would: He set out to prove spiritualism false and rob his friend Doyle of the only comforting fiction that was keeping him sane. It was the least he could do.

I was sort of born into a Subud cult that has ties to Islam and Indonesia and Middle Eastern spiritualism. My parents were kind of trial-and-error when it came to religion.

Bankruptcy is a sacred state, a condition beyond conditions, as theologians might say, and attempts to investigate it are necessarily obscene, like spiritualism. One knows only that he has passed into it and lives beyond us, in a condition not ours.

Home's book, Lights and Shadows of Spiritualism, a work that castigated a number of mediums for faking manifestations and duping clients out of their fortunes, said not a word that was disparaging of Kate or Maggie Fox.

I have made compacts with fourteen different persons that whichever of us died first would communicate with the other if it were possible, but I have never received a word.

harmonialism"—a belief that spiritual, physical, and even economic well-being flow from a person's connection with metaphysical forces of the cosmos—manifested itself in such new forms of thought as Spiritualism, Christian Science, New Thought, and Theosophy.

You believe that to be a medium you must hold your spirit aside to let another spirit come. That however, is not how it is. You must rather be a servant of the spirits, you must become a plastic instrument for the spirits' own hands. You must let your spirit be used, your prayer must be always May I be used.

The use of the divine gift of common sense would teach the opponents of the philosophy that what was shown to be fraud was not spiritualism and that a doctrine that thrives in the midst of the bitterest oppression and grows in the fire of persecution has some measure of truth in its keeping to give it vitality.

She wasn't religious. She didn't believe in heaven or hell, only in ghosts, Ouija boards, tables which rapped and little inept voices speaking plaintively of flowers

The heyday of spiritualism--with its seances and spirit communications zinging through the ether--coincided with the dawn of the electric age. The generation that so readily embraced spiritualism was the same generation that had been asked to accept such seeming witchery as electricity, telegraphy, radio waves, and telephonic communications--disembodied voices mysteriously travelling through space and emerging from a receiver hundreds of miles distant

The reluctance to accept coincidence lies at the heart of telepathy, spiritualism, ghosts and other manifestations of the supernatural. The mystical mentality insists that something caused a coincidence; something made things go bump in the night. Superstition

I wish to confound all these people, to create a work of art of a supernatural realism and of a spiritualist naturalism. I wish to prove... that nothing is explained in the mysteries which surround us.

I'm not really into religion.

Among their many fans was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, who became a convinced spiritualist and spent the last dozen years of his life deeply involved in the occult.

I am, indeed, an absolute materialist so far as actual belief goes; with not a shred of credence in any form of supernaturalism—religion, spiritualism, transcendentalism, metempsychosis, or immortality.

A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated spiritualism: a secular, ostensibly scientific way of affirming the primacy of spirit over matter.

Spiritualism and Spiritism/Espiritismo are systems of contacting and honoring spirits.

My grandmother's first husband was a spiritualist medium. What fascinates me about that is the balance between conviction and sincerity and trickery, which is also something that novelists are very familiar with.

E]r gibt uns das Gefühl, weniger einsam zu sein in dieser Sackgasse im Dienste der Großen-Eitelkeit-Idealismus-Realismus-Spiritualismus-Materialismus des Abendlandes, G.m.b.H.

I was interested in psychic things and in spiritualism even as a boy. I'd started doing yoga by the early 1970s.

My brother was my first guru who introduced me to spiritualism at a very young age. He later even enrolled me into Ramakrishna Mission.

I don't understand why people insist on pitting concepts of evolution and creation against each other. Why can't they see that spiritualism and science are one? That bodies evolve and souls evolve and the universe is a fluid package that marries them both in a wonderful package called a human being. What's wrong with that idea?