c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Death is someone you see very clearly with eyes in the center of your heart: eyes that see not by reacting to light, but by reacting to a kind of a chill from within the marrow of your own life. 
— Thomas Merton, The Intimate Merton: His Life from His Journals
May the life I live speak for me, not my religion or denomination title.
— Dee Dee M. Scott
Be the light you want to attract, and darkness will have no spell over you. Darkness is dispelled by light.
— Rebecca Rosen
A good heart is better than all the heads in the world.
— Edward L. Wheeler
It is only when we have renounced our preoccupation with "I," "me," "mine," that we can truly possess the world in which we live. Everything, provided that we regard nothing as property. And not only is everything ours; it is also everybody else's.
— Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy
How often do we talk just to fill up the quiet space? How often do we waste our breath talking about nonsense?
— Colleen Patrick-Goudreau
There is no life without death.
— Kyle Idleman, Not a Fan: Becoming a Completely Committed Follower of Jesus
If in any quest for magic, in any search for sorcery, witchery, legerdemain, first check the human spirit.
— Rod Serling, The Twilight Zone: Complete Stories
There is not a moment in which God does not present Himself under the cover of some pain to be endured, of some consolation to be enjoyed, or of some duty to be performed. All that takes place within us, around us, or through us, contains and conceals His divine action.
— Jean-Pierre de Caussade, Abandonment to Divine Providence
Today I want to belong. I want to feel safe and at home. I want to be aware of what it is like simply to be, without defenses or desires. I will appreciate the flow of life for what it is-my own true self. I will notice those moments of intimacy with myself, when I feel that “I am” is enough to sustain me forever. I will lie on the grass at one with nature, expanding until my being fades into the infinite.
— Deepak Chopra
Meditation is an essential travel partner on your journey of personal transformation. Meditation connects you with your soul,and this connection gives you access to your intuition, your heartfelt desires, your integrity, and the inspiration to create a life you love.
— Sarah McLean
Love manifests its reality in deeds, not only in words-these alone are without effect.
— Abdu'l-Bahá
At the last, this is what will determine a fulfilling, meaningful life, a life that, behind all the facades, every one of us longs to live: gratitude for the blessings that expresses itself by becoming the blessing.
— Ann Voskamp, One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are
The views of others reflect not at all upon you unless you allow them to. Their views are colored by their own life experiences: their fears, their loves, their hatreds, their needs, their insecurities. Nothing you can say will ever change their minds. Only they can do that. What better way to show them the error of their ways than to demonstrate to them that the Light that they revere is in every path to spirituality? To lead and instruct by being the best that we can be, always? And that darkness can be found in anyone, in any faith, and that it is not so much to be feared so long as it is in balance with the Light within. Balance is the key. Tolerance is the way.
— Madelyn Alt, No Rest for the Wiccan
Honor your desire for a new life. Say yes to the small inklings of interest and curiosity that present themselves each day.
— Lynn A. Robinson, Divine Intuition: Your Inner Guide to Purpose, Peace, and Prosperity, Revised and Updated
Prisoner of Her Own Captivity
— Brandalynn Davis
Be Still My Heart while God is Healing me inside
— Marcia Bundalian-Stephen
In a culture of hyper-consumption the advertising industry has brainwashed many people into believing they can raise their status just by driving a particular brand of whatever it is they are pushing at you.
— Stephen Richards
The highest goal of spirituality is Self-realization, but what does that mean? It means to feel your Self as a living reality in this moment, and there is always only this moment. (10)
— Gay Hendricks, Already Home: Radiant Wisdom and Life-Changing Meditations from Ramana Maharshi, Sri Nisargadatta, and Teachers of the Advaita Tradition
We need repentance. You see, repentance is not only going to a priest and confessing. We must free ourselves from the obsession of thoughts. We fall many times during our life, and it is absolutely necessary to reveal everything [in Confession] to a priest who is a witness to our repentance.Repentance is the renewal of life. This means we must free ourselves from all our negative traits and turn toward absolute good. No sin is unforgivable except the sin of unrepentance.
— Thaddeus of Vitovnica, Our Thoughts Determine Our Lives:  The Life and Teachings of Elder Thaddeus of Vitovnica
Nature reflects the moods of the wizard.
— Deepak Chopra, The Way of the Wizard: Twenty Spiritual Lessons for Creating the Life You Want
Everything is defeated before love.
— Thaddeus of Vitovnica, Our Thoughts Determine Our Lives:  The Life and Teachings of Elder Thaddeus of Vitovnica
The worst evil is not to commit crimes, but to fail to do the good one might have done.
— Léon Bloy
You are sheep among wolves; be wise as serpents, yet innocent as doves.
— Anonymous, Holy Bible: King James Version
...the incarnation is the complete refutation of every human system and institution that claims to control, possess, and distribute God. Whatever any church or religious leader may claim in regard to their particular access to God or control over your experience of God, the incarnation is the last word: God loves the world. God came into the world in the form of the people he created, the human race (including you and me), who bear his image. God's creation of humanity in his image gives hints of who he is, since we all are marked by his fingerprints.But as flawed humans, we give only a vague hint of God. Our broken reflection of God's image is easily drowned out by our broken humanity. then, two thousand years ago, God came in his fullness. He came to all of us in Jesus. The incarnation is not owned, trademarked, or controlled by any church. It belongs to every human being. The incarnation is not something that requires a distributor or middleman. It is a gracious gift to every person everywhere, religious or not. God gave himself to us in Jesus.
— Michael Spencer, Mere Churchianity: Finding Your Way Back to Jesus-Shaped Spirituality
... the powerful changes that happen in the life of a disciple never come from the disciple working hard at doing anything. They come from arriving at a place where Jesus is everything, and we are simply overwhelmed with the gift. Sometimes it seems as if God loves us too much. His love goes far beyond our ability to stop being moral, religious, obedient, and victorious, and we just collapse in his arms.Out of the gospel that Jesus is the only Mediator between God and humanity comes a Christian life that looks like Jesus, a life Jesus would recognize. It's a life that looks like Jesus, because Jesus does everything, and all we do is accept his gift. And to accept his gift, we have to give up trying to be Jesus.Out of that discovery comes a Christian life that is free from the tyranny of unnecessary adjectives - even my preferred modified, Jesus-shaped - and simply follows after the One who loves us beyond words or repayment.
— Michael Spencer, Mere Churchianity: Finding Your Way Back to Jesus-Shaped Spirituality
It is rare to find an established community of Christians that encourages radical expressions of following Jesus. The natural conservatism of institutions is deeply rooted in the desire to survive, and that desire colors and limits the way they read the Bible and how they see God functioning in the world.
— Michael Spencer, Mere Churchianity: Finding Your Way Back to Jesus-Shaped Spirituality
The point, I decided, wasn't to have the autobiography or even the memories. The point was who I became when I wrote.
— Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew, On The Threshold: Home, Hardwood, and Holiness
Our intelligence cannot wall itself up alive, like a pupa in a chrysalis. It must at any cost keep on speaking terms with the universe that engendered it.
— William James, A Pluralistic Universe
It is only when you touch the higher that you realize how low we may be among the possibilities of creation.
— Arthur Conan Doyle, The Maracot Deep
Human soul is a car and human body is a driver. One cannot run without the other.
— Santosh Kalwar
When you blame, you open up a world of excuses, because as long as you're looking outside, you miss the opportunity to look inside, and you continue to suffer.
— Donna Quesada, Buddha in the Classroom: Zen Wisdom to Inspire Teachers
[Spiritual friendship] is eagerly helping one another know, serve, love, and resemble God in deeper and deeper ways.
— Timothy J. Keller, The Meaning of Marriage: Facing the Complexities of Commitment with the Wisdom of God
Every soul innately yearns for stillness, for a space, a garden where we can till, sow, reap, and rest, and by doing so come to a deeper sense of self and our place in the universe. Silence is not an absence but a presence. Not an emptiness but repletion A filling up.
— Anne D. LeClaire
Do not invest time and money into yourself to have others completely destroy it!
— Stephen Richards
May I see the beauty in others without denigrating my own.
— Kimber Simpkins, Full: How one woman found yoga, eased her inner hunger, and started loving herself
The Tantric sages tell us that our in-breath and out-breath actually mirror the divine creative gesture. With the inhalation, we draw into our own center, our own being. With the exhalation, we expand outward into the world.
— Sally Kempton, Awakening Shakti: The Transformative Power of the Goddesses of Yoga
The GURU is Inside.
— davidji, Secrets of Meditation: A Practical Guide to Inner Peace and Personal Transformation
At our core there is silence and stillness…that is truly who we are when you peel away the titles, the ego, the thoughts, the beliefs, the intellect….once you get REALLY naked –you will see that who you are has nothing to do with all that we have given meaning to.
— davidji
We all have the same root, and are connected...To tap into this connectedness we must go within.
— Summerlyn Guthrie
Global betterment is a mental process, not one that requires huge sums of money or a high level of authority. Change has to be psychological.
— Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
The greatest hunger in life is not for food, money, success, status, security, sex, or even love from the opposite sex. Time and again people have achieved all these things and wound up still feeling dissatisfied- indeed, often more dissatisfied than when they began. The deepest hunger in life is a secret that is revealed only when a person is willing to unlock a hidden part of the self. In the ancient traditions of wisdom, this quest has been likened to diving for the most precious pearl in existence, a poetic way of saying that you have to swim far out beyond shallow waters, plunge deep into yourself, and search patiently until the pearl beyond price is found. The pearl is also called essence, the breath of god, the water of life…labels for what we, in our more prosaic scientific age, would simply call TRANSFORMATION.
— Deepak Chopra, The Book of Secrets: Unlocking the Hidden Dimensions of Your Life
We all have an inner voice, our personal whisper from the universe. All we have to do is listen -- feel and sense it with an open heart. Sometimes it whispers of intuition or precognition. Other times, it whispers an awareness, a remembrance from another plane. Dare to listen. Dare to hear with your heart.
— C.J. Heck, Bits and Pieces: Short Stories from a Writer's Soul
Perhaps if we could popularise through the techniques of branding and consumerism, a different idea, a different narrative, perhaps the world can change. After all it changes constantly and incessantly, it's just the perceptions that we have are governed by people with self-interest and are not inalignment with the health and safety of us as individuals or as a planet.
— Russell Brand
We live as ripples of energy in the vast ocean of energy.
— Deepak Chopra, The Way of the Wizard: Twenty Spiritual Lessons for Creating the Life You Want
The willingness to reach inside every part of yourself opens the door to total understanding. You place your entire identity on the line, not just an isolated part. This may sound daunting, but actually it’s the most natural way to approach any situation. When you hold some part of yourself in reserve you deny it exposure to life; you repress its energy and keep it form understanding what it needs to know.
— Deepak Chopra, The Book of Secrets: Unlocking the Hidden Dimensions of Your Life
Nature loves efficiency, which is very odd for something supposedly working at random. When you drop a ball, it falls straight down without taking any unexpected detours. When two molecules with the potential for bonding meet, they always bond- there is no room for indecision. This expenditure of least energy, also called the law of least effort, covers human beings, too. Certainly our bodies cannot escape the efficiency of the chemical processes goings on in each cell, so it is probable that our whole being is wrapped up in the same principle. This argument also applies to personal growth- the idea that everyone is doing the best he or she can from his or her own level of consciousness
— Deepak Chopra, The Book of Secrets: Unlocking the Hidden Dimensions of Your Life
It is only through silent awareness that our physical and mental nature can change. This change is completely spontaneous. If we make an effort to change we do no more than shift our attention from one level, from one thing, to another. We remain in a vicious circle. This only transfers energy from one point to another. It still leaves us oscillating between suffering and pleasure, each leading inevitably back to the other. Only living stillness, stillness without someone trying to be still, is capable of undoing the conditioning our biologoical, emotional and psychological nature has undergone. There is no controller, no selector, no personality making choices. In choiceless living the situation is given the freedom to unfold. You do not grasp one aspect over another for there is nobody to grasp. When you understand something and live it without being stuck to the formulation, what you have understood dissolves in your openness. In this silence change takes place of its own accord, the problem is resolved and duality ends. You are left in your glory where no one has understood and nothing has been understood.
— Jean Klein, I Am
The spiritual path can only be traveled through the daily experience of love.
— Paulo Coelho, By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept
Understanding the Way of Story as a sacred pattern and a living event. Story can reveal a spiritual path and or the way to healing. Stories become the foundation of health, peacebuilding and vision. Learning to listen, to recognize, to understand and attend the teachings and revelations of the Stories we have been given to live guides us toward the 5th world. Our individual stories, when carefully attended, can reveal each person’s particular path of healing and transformation. Even illness is a story that can lead us to our own and to community healing. Learning to recognize the Story that we or another is living can be a worthy life work.
— Deena Metzger
The same faint song is heard in everything: "Behold yourself".
— Deepak Chopra, The Way of the Wizard: Twenty Spiritual Lessons for Creating the Life You Want
We live in the Age of the Higher Brain, the cerebral cortex that has grown enormously over the last few millennia, overshadowing the ancient, instinctive lower brain. The cortex is often called the new brain, yet the old brain held sway in humans for millions of years, as it does today in most living things. The old brain can’t conjure up ideas or read. But it does possess the power to feel and, above all, to be. It was the old brain that caused our forebears to sense the closeness of a mysterious presence everywhere in Nature.
— Deepak Chopra, The Book of Secrets: Unlocking the Hidden Dimensions of Your Life
The basis of everything in the wizards' world rests upon the insight "All this is myself." Therefore, in accepting the world as it is, the wizard views everything in the light of self-acceptance, which is the light of love.
— Deepak Chopra, The Way of the Wizard: Twenty Spiritual Lessons for Creating the Life You Want
it’s as if the universe has a sense of humor, since at a deep level it’s impossible not to lead a spiritual life…the universe is living through you at this moment. with or without belief in god, the chain of events leading from silent awareness to physical reality remains intact.
— Deepak Chopra, The Book of Secrets: Unlocking the Hidden Dimensions of Your Life
Any methodology for developing patience requires a multi-tiered approach.
— Allan Lokos, Patience: The Art of Peaceful Living
The images of Myth are reflections of Spiritual and Depth potentialities of every one of us. Through contemplating those we evoke those powers in our own lives to operate through ourselves.
— Joseph Campbell
When we talk to our fellow men and they tell us about their troubles, we will listen to them carefully if we have love for them. We will have compassion for their suffering and pain, for we are God's creatures; we are a manifestation of the love of God.
— Thaddeus of Vitovnica, Our Thoughts Determine Our Lives:  The Life and Teachings of Elder Thaddeus of Vitovnica
There is no error more absurd, and yet more rooted in the heart of man, than the belief that his sufferings will promote his spiritual safety.
— Charles Robert Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer
But people of the deepest understanding look within, distracted by nothing. Since a clear mind is the Buddha, they attain the understanding of a Buddha without using the mind.
— Bodhidharma, The Zen Teaching of Bodhidharma
Jesus never pussyfooted
— Elisabeth Elliot, The Mark of a Man
We typically misunderstand what's wrong about consumerism. It's not that it makes us love material things too much. To be a good consumer, you have to desire to get lots of things, but you must not love any of them too much once you have them. Consumerism needs children who do not stay attached to their toys for very long and learn to expect the next round of presents as soon as possible. When consumerism succeeds, our attachments are shallow, easily broken, so we can move on to the next thing we're supposed to get. Being a good consumer means desiring new things, not cherishing old ones. And the new things you're supposed to desire are not always material things. Spirituality is now a consumerist enterprise, too.
— Phillip Cary, Good News for Anxious Christians: Ten Practical Things You Don't Have to Do
If it happens that the human race doesn't make it, then the fact that we were here once will not be altered, that once upon a time we peopled this astonishing blue planet, and wondered intelligently at everything about it and the other things who lived here with us on it, and that we celebrated the beauty of it in music and art, architecture, literature, and dance, and that there were times when we approached something godlike in our abilities and aspirations. We emerged out of depthless mystery, and back into mystery we returned,and in the end the mystery is all there is.
— James Howard Kunstler, The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century
The verbal tool of exploring mystery together is not confrontation or preaching but dialogue. We subject ourselves to the same questions we pose to others, and as we traverse them together, we may arrive at surprising conclusions we could never have reached when simply trying to defeat one another's logic. Our questions are open ended, granting the other person the freedom to respond or not to respond. The questions stick with us, even haunt us, long after we ask them, and we await insight together. The process is more important than an immediate decision.
— Adam S. McHugh, Introverts in the Church: Finding Our Place in an Extroverted Culture
When nations resort to arms, the human spirit is like a bird that cannot stand to hear its own song.
— Phoenix Desmond, Make Love to the Universe: Himalayan Masters Share Spiritual Wisdom
One of the things that kills Buddhist spiritual life is excessive seriousness.
— Gil Fronsdal
You can't get too far into the Gospels without noticing that Jesus made a pretty lousy apologist.
— Rachel Held Evans, Evolving in Monkey Town: How a Girl Who Knew All the Answers Learned to Ask the Questions
Whether we eat, sleep, work, play, whatever we do life contains dissatisfaction, pain. If we enjoy pleasure, we are afraid to lose it; we strive for more and more pleasure or try to contain it. If we suffer pain we want to escape it. We experience dissatisfaction all the time. All activities contain dissatisfaction or pain, continuously.
— Chögyam Trungpa
... the effort to discover an authentic self, to strip away layers of alienation and culturally imposed identity and find a soul in a clear, unimpeded communion with the sacred is consonant with spiritual quests throughout the ages. Spiritual feminists, no less than medieval mystics, are searching in the ways made available to them through their culture to separate themselves from everything in their hearts and minds that puts them at odds with the divine plan (and therefore with their own best interests), and to find a true harmony between themselves and the universe.
— Cynthia Eller
A few heart-whole, sincere, and energetic men and women can do more in a year than a mob in a century.
— Swami Vivekananda
The reason that you are blessed in excess with anything is so that you can give it away to someone else in need.
— Dee Dee M. Scott, Joy Cometh In The Morning
Time and again I hear how important the darker environment is to those at our vintage-faith worship gathering. Attenders feel they can freely pray in a corner by themselves without feeling that everyone is staring at them.
— Dan Kimball, The Emerging Church: Vintage Christianity for New Generations
I have my own way to walk and for some reason or other Zen is right in the middle of it wherever I go. So there it is, with all its beautiful purposelessness, and it has become very familiar to me though I do not know "what it is." Or even if it is an "it." Not to be foolish and multiply words, I'll say simply that it seems to me that Zen is the very atmosphere of the Gospels, and the Gospels are bursting with it. It is the proper climate for any monk, no matter what kind of monk he may be. If I could not breathe Zen I would probably die of spiritual asphyxiation.
— Thomas Merton
Equanimity is the hallmark of spirituality. It is neither chasing nor avoiding but just being in the middle.
— Amit Ray, Meditation: Insights and Inspirations
The Stone of Guilt in the River of the Mind, the block in the flow of intelligence.~ Paramahamsa Nithyananda
— Paramahamsa Nithyananda, Living Enlightenment
You will be a different person after the storm, because the storm will heal you from your perfection.
— Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life
You are magnificent beyond measure, perfect in your imperfections, and wonderfully made.
— Abiola Abrams, The Sacred Bombshell Handbook of Self-Love
He had never believed that spirituality had to be anemic or aesthetic.
— Irving Stone, The Agony and the Ecstasy: A Biographical Novel of Michelangelo
Far from making me feel different and special, my [spiritual] experiences made me feel the same, ordinary, and interconnected. If I felt more spiritual, everyone else felt more spiritual as well. (276)
— Julia Cameron, God is No Laughing Matter
We think that mercy is a sweeter and easier thing than justice, but it is not so; for justice takes us as we are, but mercy assaults us and batters at the gates of our heart, demanding that we be made new...Sometimes sorrow is easier than joy, and despair more comforting that hope.
— Anthony M. Esolen
A man can gasp out his life beside you-and you feel none of it. Pity, Sympathy, sure-but you don't feel the pain. Your belly is whole and that's what counts. A half-yard away someone's world is snuffled out in roaring agony-and you feel nothing. That's the misery of the world.
— Erich Maria Remarque, Flotsam
Science and Truth are simple phenomenon of nature, but it is the known that is preventing us from mastering the unknown.
— Chandrakanth Natekar
Fill what is empty empty what is full 
— davidji
Divinity means unfolding and expressing life in new ways. Divinity means radiating peace, bliss and beauty in the world. Divinity means overcoming the limitations of nature in new ways.
— Amit Ray, Walking the Path of Compassion
The human experience of weakness is God's blueprint for calling attention to the supremacy of his Son. When miserably failing people continue to belong to, believe in, and worship Jesus, God is happy.
— Michael Spencer, Mere Churchianity: Finding Your Way Back to Jesus-Shaped Spirituality
The unique personality which is the real life in me, I can not gain unless I search for the real life, the spiritual quality, in others. I am myself spiritually dead unless I reach out to the fine quality dormant in others. For it is only with the god enthroned in the innermost shrine of the other, that the god hidden in me, will consent to appear.
— Felix Adler
Let us then, my brethren, endure in hope. Let us devote ourselves, side-by-side with our hoping, so that the God of all the universe, as he beholds our intention, may cleanse us from all sins, fill us with high hopes from what we have in hand, and grant us the change of heart that saves. God has called you, and you have your calling.
— Cyril of Jerusalem
There is a greater purpose to living which is found in the spirit, which is the Being, and that purpose is worth living for.
— Belsebuub
At the foundation of the Christian life, there is a kind of sacred individuality, a sort of holy aloneness that cries out to be left alone with God. This isn't all of the Christian life. It doesn't erase those parts of a Christian's experience that happen in the context of relationships, but this sacred solitude needs to be discovered, respected, and protected.It is that place where we most irrefutably hear God tell us that he loves us, and we come to know that, no matter what other people may say about us or do to us, God will not abandon us. That holy solitude is the place where we find God's Spirit changing our affections and redirecting our identities. It is, for Jesus-followers, holy ground.
— Michael Spencer, Mere Churchianity: Finding Your Way Back to Jesus-Shaped Spirituality
I have found my way, step by step, proceeding from touch points that have emerged, some through conscious choice and some through dream state discovery.
— Leonard Nimoy, Shekhina
From the pool of awakenings which includes creativity, strength, generosity, loving-kindness and transformation, I selected seven awakenings to immerse myself in each day: consciousness, compassion, forgiveness, expansion, abundance, healing, and balance. I believe that if we can live a life toward mastery of any seven principles in the pool of awakenings, then our lives will flourish and those we hold dear in our lives will experience greater fulfillment. Which seven do you choose?
— davidji, Secrets of Meditation: A Practical Guide to Inner Peace and Personal Transformation
The Truth is the only thing you’ll ever run into that has no agenda.
— Adyashanti, Emptiness Dancing
Now God, who has made us, knows what we are and that our happiness lies in Him.
— C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain
The world has yet to see what God will do with a man fully consecrated to Him
— Dwight L. Moody
So learn how much you're worth to God. Revel in that information and then walk in it.
— Michelle McKinney Hammond
The music echoes in the emptiness. It reminds us where we came from and where we’re bound.
— David Mutti Clark, Professor Brown Shoes Teaches the Blues
Now the proper good of a creature is to surrender itself to its Creator - to enact intellectually, volitionally and emotionally, that relationship which is given in the mere fact of its being a creature when it does so, it is good and happy.
— C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain
You got infinite channels and limitless rhymes, but the riddles of livin' stay undefined?
— David Mutti Clark, Professor Brown Shoes Teaches the Blues
We are the Masters of each moment.
— davidji, Secrets of Meditation: A Practical Guide to Inner Peace and Personal Transformation
When someone comes to you for some help it means Allah has chosen you for gaining some good deeds its upon us how we look at it.....
— Adil Adam Memon
England and the English governing class never did call on this absurd deity of race until it seemed, for an instant, that they had no other god to call on… the truth of the whole matter is very simple. Nationality exists, and has nothing in the world to do with race. Nationality is a thing like a church or a secret society. It is the product of the human soul and will; it is a spiritual product. And there are men… who would think anything and do anything rather than admit anything could be a spiritual product.
— G.K. Chesterton
Ever have a dream so real you felt you could reach out and touch it?
— Doug Dillon
That's a spiritual lifestyle, being willing to admit that you don't know everything and that you were wrong about some things. It's about making a list of all the people you've harmed, either emotionally or physically or financially, and going back and making amends. That's a spiritual lifestyle. It's not a fluffy ethereal concept.
— Anthony Kiedis, Scar Tissue
It was deeply a part of Lee's kindness and understanding that man's right to kill himself is inviolable, but sometimes a friend can make it unnecessary
— John Steinbeck, Cannery Row
Courage is often associated with aggression, but instead should be seen as a willingness to act from the heart.
— Donna Quesada, Buddha in the Classroom: Zen Wisdom to Inspire Teachers
The man who wishes to know the "that" which is "thou" may set to work in any one of three ways. He may begin by looking inwards into his own particular thou and, by a process of "dying to self" --- self in reasoning, self in willing, self in feeling --- come at last to knowledge of the self, the kingdom of the self, the kingdom of God that is within. Or else he may begin with the thous existing outside himself, and may try to realize their essential unity with God and, through God, with one another and with his own being. Or, finally (and this is doubtless the best way), he may seek to approach the ultimate That both from within and from without, so that he comes to realize God experimentally as at once the principle of his own thou and of all other thous, animate and inanimate.
— Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy
Mythology is composed by poets out of their insights and realizations. Mythologies are not invented they are found. You can no more tell us what your dream is going to be tonight than we can invent a myth. Myths come from the mystical region of essential experience. 
— Joseph Campbell
Two chemicals called actin and myosin evolved eons ago to allow the muscles in insect wings to contract and relax. Thus, insects learned to fly. When one of those paired molecules are absent, wings will grow but they cannot flap and are therefore useless. Today, the same two proteins are responsible for the beating of the human heart, and when one is absent, the person’s heartbeat is inefficient and weak, ultimately leading to heart failure.Again, science marvels at the way molecules adapt over millions of years, but isn’t there a deeper intent? In our hearts, we feel the impulse to fly, to break free of boundaries. Isn’t that the same impulse nature expressed when insects began to take flight? The prolactin that generates milk in a mother’s breast is unchanged from the prolactin that sends salmon upstream to breed, enabling them to cross from saltwater to fresh.
— Deepak Chopra, The Book of Secrets: Unlocking the Hidden Dimensions of Your Life
I haven't any language weak enough to depict the weakness of my spiritual life. If I weakened it enough it would cease to be language at all. As when you try to turn the gas-ring a little lower still, and it merely goes out.
— C.S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer
Time exists so that you can experience these flavors as deeply as possible. On the path of devotion, if you can experience even a glimmer of love, its possible to experience a little more love. When you experience that a little more, then the next degree of intensity is possible. Thus, love engenders love until you reach the point of saturation, when you totally merge with the divine love. this is what the mystics mean when they say that they plunge into the ocean of love to drown themselves.
— Deepak Chopra, The Book of Secrets: Unlocking the Hidden Dimensions of Your Life
Think of a globe, a revolving globe on a stand. Think of a contour globe, whose mountain ranges cast shadows, whose continents rise in bas-relief above the oceans. But then: think of how it really is. These heights are just suggested; they’re there….when I think of walking across a continent I think of all the neighborhood hills, the tiny grades up which children drag their sleds. It is all so sculptured, three-dimensional, casting a shadow. What if you had an enormous globe that was so huge it showed roads and houses- a geological survey globe, a quarter of a mile to an inch- of the whole world, and the ocean floor! Looking at it, you would know what had to be left out: the free-standing sculptural arrangement of furniture in rooms, the jumble of broken rocks in the creek bed, tools in a box, labyrinthine ocean liners, the shape of snapdragons, walrus. Where is the one thing you care about in earth, the molding of one face? The relief globe couldn’t begin to show trees, between whose overlapping boughs birds raise broods, or the furrows in bark, where whole creatures, creatures easily visible, live our their lives and call it world enough. What do I make of all this texture? What does it mean about the kind of world in which I have been set down? The texture of the world, its filigree and scrollwork, means that there is a possibility for beauty here, a beauty inexhaustible in its complexity, which opens to my knock, which answers in me a call I do not remember calling, and which trains me to the wild and extravagant nature of the spirit I seek.
— Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
What I aim to do is not so much learn the names of the shreds of creation that flourish in this valley, but to keep myself open to their meanings, which is to try to impress myself at all times with the fullest possible force of their very reality. I want to have things as multiply and intricately as possible present and visible in my mind. Then I might be able to sit on the hill by the burnt books where the starlings fly over, and see not only the starlings, the grass field, the quarried rock, the viney woods, Hollins pond, and the mountains beyond, but also, and simultaneously, feathers’ barbs, springtails in the soil, crystal in rock, chloroplasts streaming, rotifers pulsing, and the shape of the air in the pines. And, if I try to keep my eye on quantum physics, if I try to keep up with astronomy and cosmology, and really believe it all, I might ultimately be able to make out the landscape of the universe. Why not?
— Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
There is no need for false solidity when you are at peace with the universal expanse of your true Being.
— Michael A. Singer
…the work of the (Muslim Sufi) dervish community was to open the heart, explore the mystery of union,to fiercely search for and try to say the truth,and to celebrate the glory and difficulty in being in human incarnation.
— Coleman Barks, The Essential Rumi
The physique of a Messiah. But too clever to believe in God or be convinced of his own mission. And too sensitive, even if he were convinced, to carry it out. His muscles would like to act and his feelings would like to believe; but his nerve-endings and his cleverness won't allow it.
— Aldous Huxley
There are those who say that spiritual enlightenment is achieved through the denial of oneself; you must deny yourself many things, go and live in a mountaintop, never mingle with other people, talk to the birds..but I say to you, why should you dismantle your home? Where is the meaning in removing the bricks from your walls one by one? What is the purpose in uprooting your floors? Is there any significance in only allowing yourself a tin roof and a muddy bed? Why deny your house its structure? A truly enlightened soul is strong enough, is bright enough to live and shine through, even in a beautiful house! There is no need to ransack the house in order to see an inner beauty etched against a distraught surrounding. A bright and beautiful soul can shine forth even from inside an equally beautiful surrounding.
— C. JoyBell C.
As Gill says, "every man is called to give love to the work of his hands. Every man is called to be an artist." The small family farm is one of the last places - they are getting rarer every day - where men and women (and girls and boys, too) can answer that call to be an artist, to learn to give love to the work of their hands. It is one of the last places where the maker - and some farmers still do talk about "making the crops" - is responsible, from start to finish, for the thing made. This certainly is a spiritual value, but it is not for that reason an impractical or uneconomic one. In fact, from the exercise of this responsibility, this giving of love to the work of the hands, the farmer, the farm, the consumer, and the nation all stand to gain in the most practical ways: They gain the means of life, the goodness of food, and the longevity and dependability of the sources of food, both natural and cultural. The proper answer to the spiritual calling becomes, in turn, the proper fulfillment of physical need.
— Wendell Berry, Bringing it to the Table: On Farming and Food
Thoughts, words, emotions & deeds not coming from love are likely coming from fear.
— Allan Lokos, Pocket Peace: Effective Practices for Enlightened Living
Don't you realize," Merlin said to his pupil, "that the history of the universe has brought us here to this second?
— Deepak Chopra, The Way of the Wizard: Twenty Spiritual Lessons for Creating the Life You Want
There is a wellspring of life within you where you can go for cleansing and transformation.
— Deepak Chopra, The Way of the Wizard: Twenty Spiritual Lessons for Creating the Life You Want
I would not say I am looking for God. Or, I am not looking for God precisely. I am not seeking the God I learned about as a Catholic child, as an 18-year-old novice in a religious community, as an agnostic graduate student, as - but who cares about my disguises? Or God's.
— Mary Rose O'Reilley, The Barn at the End of the World: The Apprenticeship of a Quaker, Buddhist Shepherd
I revel in flowers without let,An atom at random in space;My soul dwells in regions ethereal,And the world is my dreaming-place.
— L. Cranmer-Byng, A Lute of Jade
As the sun went down, I saw a solitary boatman disporting on the smooth lake. The falling dews seemed to strain and purify the air, and I was soothed with an infinite stillness. I got the world, as it were, by the nape of the neck, and held it under in the tide of its own events, till it was drowned, and then I let it go down stream like a dead dog. Vast hollow chambers of silence stretched away on every side, and my being expanded in proportion, and filled them. Then first could I appreciate sound, and find it musical.
— Henry David Thoreau, Letters to a Spiritual Seeker
Now take all these qualities together: order, balance, evolution and intelligence. What you have is a description of love. It's not the popular ideal, it is the wizard's love - the force that upholds life and nurtures it.
— Deepak Chopra, The Way of the Wizard: Twenty Spiritual Lessons for Creating the Life You Want
When God is driven to the periphery of the public square, the human spiritual capacity longs for exercise, and it often finds it in the “suspension of disbelief” and activity of the imagination that are available in novels and movies.
— John Granger
Ibn Mas'ud said that Allah's Messenger said: Abusing a Muslim is sinful and fighting with his tantamount to Kufr. Bukhari Muslim
— Ahmad Von Denffer, A Day with the Prophet
Material things have closed boundaries; they are not accessible, cannot be penetrated, by things outside themselves. But one's existence as a spiritual being involves being and remaining oneself and at the same time admitting and transforming into oneself the reality of the world. No other material thing can be present in the space occupied by a house, a tree, or a fountain pen. But where there is mind, the totality of things has room; it is "possible that in a single being the comprehensiveness of the whole universe may dwell.
— Josef Pieper, Happiness and Contemplation
Even the wise appear foolish before one who brings peace to another.
— Phoenix Desmond, Make Love to the Universe: Himalayan Masters Share Spiritual Wisdom
The Lord has to break us down at the strongest part of our self-life before He can have His own way of blessing us.
— James H. McConkey
Ascension to successive echelons in the pyramid of awareness is an act of inclusion requiring unconditional acceptance of all that lies below.
— Gerald R. Stanek, Skirting the Gorge — A Novel
When we refer to 'the biblical approach to economics' or the biblical response to politics' or 'biblical womanhood,' we're using the Bible as a weapon disguised as an adjective.
— Rachel Held Evans, Evolving in Monkey Town: How a Girl Who Knew All the Answers Learned to Ask the Questions
The aspirant would do well to avoid those ‘spiritual teachers’ who delight in pointing out the evils of the world. These are immature egos attempting to discard their own negativities by projecting them onto others. The true yogi is one who is like a lion with himself, always striving to eradicate that which shadows his inner light, and like a lamb with others, always striving to see their inner light, no matter how dense may be the clouds that hide it. He is the king of the jungle of his world. He hides from no one and seeks escape from nothing. (88)
— Prem Prakash, The Yoga of Spiritual Devotion A Modern Translation of the Narada Bhakti Sutras
... without the incarnation, Christianity isn't even a very good story, and most sadly, it means nothing. "Be nice to one another" is not a message that can give my life meaning, assure me of love beyond brokenness, and break open the dark doors of death with the key of hope.The incarnation is an essential part of Jesus-shaped spirituality.
— Michael Spencer, Mere Churchianity: Finding Your Way Back to Jesus-Shaped Spirituality
Passion presented with a greater challenge achieves a greater goal.-- from The Sexual Side of Spirituality
— Aberjhani, Journey through the Power of the Rainbow: Quotations from a Life Made Out of Poetry
Logically, you should go to school, get good grades, go to college, get a good degree, go into the workplace, then work hard and be happy. The only problem is that happiness isn't logical.
— A.C. Ping, Be
In the spiritual body moreover, man appears such as he is with respect to love and faith, for everyone in the spiritual world is the effigy of his own love, not only as to the face and the body, but also as to the speech and the actions
— Emanuel Swedenborg
For the first time in this 11 years--I have come to love the darkness--for I believe now that it is a part, a very, very small part of Jesus' dakness and pain on earth. You have taught me to accept it [as] a "spiritual side of 'your work'"... (Mother Teresa, quoated in Kolodiejchuk, p. 208).
— Brian Kolodiejchuk, Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light: The Private Writings of the Saint of Calcutta
The more you understand your true spiritual identity, and your connection with the Supreme, the easier it will be to love your Self.
— Stephen Knapp
Be formless. As long as your "I" is asserted, it will be an idol of worship
— AainaA-Ridtz, The Sacred Key — Transcending Humanity
The definition of God as infinite Love was a particularly important theme for [John Duns] Scotus. He disagreed with Anselm, who understood the Incarnation as a necessary payment for sin. He also disagreed with Thomas [Aquinas], who argued that the Incarnation, though willed by God from eternity, was made necessary by the existence of sin. For Scotus the Incarnation was willed through eternity as an expression of God's love, and hence God's desire for consummated union with creation. Our redemption by the cross, though caused by sin, was likewise an expression of God's love and compassion, rather than as an appeasement of God's anger or a form of compensation for God's injured majesty. Scotus believed that...knowledge of God's love should evoke a loving response on the part of humanity. 'I am of the opinion that God wished to redeem us in this fashion principally in order to draw us to his love.' Through our own loving self-gift, he argued, we join with Christ 'in becoming co-lovers of the Holy Trinity.
— Robert Ellsberg
Jesus never asked me to give to an organization the kind of exclusive devotion he demands from his disciples. Over and over, Jesus calls people to himself - out of the church, the culture, the economy, and the family.
— Michael Spencer, Mere Churchianity: Finding Your Way Back to Jesus-Shaped Spirituality
Playing along in the yard, The blue sky sparkles against the earthly green,Creating such harmony!A pond, nearby.Untroubled waters mirrors the ether's dreams.A grand echo of my Divine Heart!I am One
— Arnaud Saint-Paul, The Human Project
Invariably, I will be referred to Gleason Archer's massive Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties, a heavy volume that seeks to provide the reader with sound explanations for every conceivable puzzle found within the Bible - from whether God approved of Rahab's lie, to where Cain got his wife. (Note to well-meaning apologists: it's not always the best idea to present a skeptic with a five-hundred-page book listing hundreds of apparent contradictions in Scripture when the skeptic didn't even know that half of them existed before you recommended it.)
— Rachel Held Evans, Evolving in Monkey Town: How a Girl Who Knew All the Answers Learned to Ask the Questions
As persons, so Mournier maintained, we possess both a spiritual and temporal dimension; we exist in history, in relationship with others, but open to transcendence and ultimately to God. This concept of the person, he believed, was denied as much by an atheistic totalitarianism of the Left as by the bourgeois materialism of capitalist society. To the extent that Christianity had become infected by the bourgeois spirit, it had become a prop in what he called, 'the established disorder.
— Robert Ellsberg, All Saints: Daily Reflections on Saints, Prophets, & Witnesses for Our Time
Jesus is compelling in the way the discovery of the stars or the experience of a one-of-a-kind romance is compelling. His presence draws you in to the deep.
— Michael Spencer, Mere Churchianity: Finding Your Way Back to Jesus-Shaped Spirituality
And for the sake of humility--a characteristic crucial to sacred questioning we might do well to confess that we're capable at any moment of such bad religion ourselves.
— David Dark
Mournier defined his own position as one of 'tragic optimism--' a Christian attitude of absolute engagement in the struggles of history, despite the fact that the Absolute cannot be contained in history. 
— Robert Ellsberg, All Saints: Daily Reflections on Saints, Prophets, & Witnesses for Our Time
Men and women often judge what they don't really know.
— John Bailey
He who knows all the answers, but none of the questions is like a large gobbling bird on Thanksgiving.
— Jayce O'Neal
Jesus Christ, it's like living with Stevie bloody Nicks,' I said, 'only without the cocaine, which would be more fun.
— Emily Perkins, Novel About My Wife