Quotes about Spirituality

Yes, we inevitably turn to God; for this religious sentiment is of its nature so pure, so delightful to the soul that experiences it, that it makes up to us for all our other losses.

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

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.

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.

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

All too many Christians have behaved as though the devil were a first principle, on the same footing as god. They have paid more attention to evil and the problem of its eradication than to good and the methods by which individual goodness may be deepened, and the sum of goodness increased.

O my God, how does it happen in this poor old world that Thou art so great and yet nobody finds Thee, that Thou callest so loudly and nobody hears Thee, that Thou art so near and nobody feels Thee, that Thou givest Thyself to everybody and nobody knows Thy name? Men flee from Thee and say they cannot find Thee; they turn their backs and say they cannot see Thee; they stop their ears and say they cannot hear Thee. Hans Denk

Turning to God without turning from self' - the formula is absurdly simple; and yet, simple as it is, it explains all the follies and iniquities committed in the name of religion.

Love is the plummet as well as the astrolabe of God's mysteries, and the pure in heart can see far down into the depths of the divine justice, to catch a glimpse, not indeed of the details of the cosmic process, but at least of its principle and nature. These insights permit them to say [...] that all shall be well, that, in spite of time, all is well, and that the problem of evil has its solution in the eternity, which men can, if they so desire, experience, but can never describe.

But I don't want comfort; I want god, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.

It is because we don't know who we are, because we are unaware that the Kingdom of Heaven is within us, that we behave in the generally silly, the often insane, and sometime criminal ways that are so characteristically human.