All Quotes By Tag: Spirituality

“Romantic Soul Seeketh Love but a Loving heart finds God”

“Accountability is the key to obedience for achieving Glory & Grace”

“But when high-profile politicians speak God in the most perfunctory manner possible, it’s no wonder supporters and opponents alike avoid speaking God altogether.”

“God sleeps in the rock, dreams in the plant, stirs in the animal, and awakens in man.”

“The operative word in these lines from D.H. Lawrence, who wasn’t a conventionally religious person, is “soul.” It’s a word that has become almost embarrassing for many contemporary people unless it is completely stripped of its religious meaning. Perhaps that’s just what it needs sometimes: to be stripped of its “religious” meaning, in the sense that faith itself sometimes needs to be stripped of its social and historical encrustations and returned to its first, churchless incarnation in the human heart. That’s what the twentieth century was, a kind of windstorm-scouring of all we thought was knowledge, and truth, and ours – until it became too strong for us, or we too weak for it, and “the self replaced the soul as the first of survival” (Fanny Howe). Anxiety comes from the self as ultimate concern, from the fact that the self cannot bear this ultimate concern: it buckles and wavers under the strain, and eventually, inevitability, it breaks.”

“Yes, but … the waking and the sleeping, the sludge of e-mails and appointments, the low-temperature life that is, for the most part, life: even if there are moments of intensity that seem to release us from this, surely any spiritual maturity demands an acknowledgment that there is not going to be some miraculous, transfiguring intrusion into reality. The sky will not darken and the dead will not speak; no voice from heaven is going to boom you back to a pre-reflective faith, nor will you feel, unless in death, a purifying fire that scalds all of consciousness like fog from the raw face of God. Is faith, then – assuming it isn’t merely a form of resignation or denial – some sort of reconciliation with the implacable fact of matter, or is it a deep, ultimate resistance to it? Both. Neither. To have faith is to acknowledge the absolute materiality of existence while acknowledging at the same time the compulsion toward transfiguring order that seems not outside of things but within them, and within you – not an idea imposed upon the world, but a vital, answering instinct. Heading home from work, irritated by my busyness and the sense of wasted days, shouldering through the strangers who merge and flow together on Michigan Avenue, merge and flow in the mirrored facades, I flash past the rapt and undecided face of my grandmother, lit and lost at once. In a board meeting, bored to oblivion, I hear a pen scrape like a fingernail on a cell wall, watch the glasses sweat as if even water wanted out, when suddenly, at the center of the long table, light makes of a bell-shaped pitcher a bell that rings in no place on this earth. Moments, only, and I am aware even within them, and thus am outside of them, yet something in the very act of such attention has troubled the tyranny of the ordinary, as if the world at which I gazed, gazed at me, as if the lost face and the living crowd, the soundless bell and the mind in which it rings, all hankered toward – expressed some undeniable hope for – one end.”

“Spirituality cannot be taught;its something very personal that you can experience for yourself. You may give spirit a name- Soul, Light, God, Universe, or even Nothingness- but each of us has to define who we are and what we believe to be spiritual according to our own understanding.”

“As he learned more math, Brodt made the wonder-inspiring observation that mathematical laws seemed to be Someone’s intention rather than just accidents in many concepts: infinity, unity being totality, irrational numbers in general and pi in particular as it illustrates such disparate occurrences as the relationship of height to base perimeter in the Great Pyramid of Giza and the course of any meandering river (over a surface smoothed for consistency). There was also the Fibonacci Sequence, that looping string of addends which, with their sums, describes the spirals on a nautilus shell, the distribution of leaves around a tree branch, and the genealogy of ants and bees. It all seemed too orderly, too regular and consistent to have occurred by chance. So many things in the world appeared as blotches, smears, or random spikes that these mathematically explained phenomena were extraordinary–he wanted to say mystical, but he wouldn’t want to be caught using that word.”

“Ours is an illusionless humanism that cares about protecting our species, especially from itself. We must forgive humanity, and ourselves, for being what we are – neither angels nor beasts…”

“Silence leads to acceptance, which leads to liberation. All of our conditioning is then suspended; so, too, are morals, manners, even simple courtesy. Dogmas, rules, commandments, churches, political parties, opinions, doctrines, ideologies, and gurus fall away. All that remains is reality. All that remains is truth. How free we suddenly feel!”

“Truth obeys no one. That is why it is free, and freeing. And since there is nothing other than truth, it commands no one, either. To what or to whom could it give orders? At such times, we have neither God nor master.”

“You have to believe what you’re saying if you’re going to convince me. I just can’t break that rule, even if I want to.”

“She was always on guard against false claims that religious faith was psychologically unhealthy. She was religious, her family and friends were religious, and they were okay. They were more than okay. They were confident, compassionate, productive people–all this while realizing that when they wanted to walk across a room, they didn’t place one foot in front of the other unless God animated them to do so.”

“Siz bu dünyaya mutlu olmak için geldiniz. Sevmek için, haz almak için, sevginizi paylaşmak için geldiniz. Bunlar sizin yaşam hakkınız. Şu anda yaşıyorsunuz. Bu haklarınızı kullanın ve yaşamdan zevk alın. İçinizden akıp geçen yaşama tepki duymayın. Çünkü içinizden akıp geçen yaşam Tanrıdır. Sizin varlığınız Tanrının varlığının kanıtıdır. Sizin varlığınız yaşamın ve enerjinin kanıtıdır.”

“Anything invested outside of God replaces him”