Spiritual Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

A community of free men cannot exist if its spiritual base is not solely law.

Jacques Maritain

You have nothing to prove. Be the spiritual you and create like a physical fiend.

The spiritual life must find its origin in silence.

Second, the only proven technique for treatment for chemically dependent people involves use of a spiritual program of self-change.

Virgil Miller Newton

When one tries to increase his knowledge by doing mental gymnastics over books without waiting upon God and looking to the guidance of the Holy Spirit, his soul is plainly in full swing. This will deplete his spiritual life. Because the fall of man was occasioned by seeking knowledge, God uses the foolishness of the cross to "destroy the wisdom of the wise.

To the fanatical believer physical and spiritual suffering is beside the point, compared with salvation. That is why, to him, everything happening around him is irrelevant, a mirror-image, a mere will-o'-the-wisp. … I can really never get shot of them, the fanatics. Whether they appear as religious fanatics or vegetarian fanatics makes no odds. They're catastrophic people. These types whose whole cast of mind as it were looks beyond mere human beings toward some unknown goal. The terrible thing is the great power they often wield over their fellow human beings. Apart from the fact that I believe they suffer like the very devil, I've no sympathy for them.

The struggle now going on for the world will never be decided by bombs or rockets, by armies or military might. The real crisis we face today is a spiritual one; at root, it is a test of moral will and faith.

When we say we're looking for a spiritual adviser, we're really looking for someone to tell us what to do with our bodies. Decisions of the flesh. We forget to learn from pleasure as well as pain.

Spiritual growth is like childbirth: you dilate, then you contract, you dilate, then you contract again. as painful as it all feels, it's the necessary rhythm for reaching the ultimate goal of total openness.

Marianne Williamson

Here is how [life] happens. We find something we want to do, if we are lucky, or something we need to do, if we are like most people. We use it as a way to obtain food, shelter, clothing, mates, comfort, a first folio of Shakespeare, model airplanes, American Girl dolls, a handful of rice, sex, solitude, a trip to Venice, Nikes, drinking water, plastic surgery, child care, dogs, medicine, education, cars, spiritual solace — whatever we think we need. To do this, we enact the role we call "me," trying to brand ourselves as a person who can and should obtain these things.

The sense of gratitude produces true spiritual alchemy, makes us magnanimous - large souled.

I was raised in a fairly strict religious family and attended 16 years of Catholic schools. I feel now that my sense of the spiritual is directly connected to my sense of wonder, my ability to be amazed by the fact of my existence in all its vital impermanence AND by the spectacular environment I wake up to every morning. I am guessing that this sense of wonder is what the creator, if there is one, is still feeling.

We have now in our possession three instruments of civilization, unknown to antiquity. These are the art of printing; free representative government; and, lastly, a pure and spiritual religion, the deep fountain of generous enthusiasm, the mighty spring of bold and lofty designs, the great sanctuary of moral power.

Most of us have developed a fairly extensive vocabulary for describing pain, as though the journal were a doctor requiring much detail to make the correct diagnosis. The roundness of the spiritual journey cannot be expressed without developing an equally extensive vocabulary for talking to ourselves and others about the nature of wonder, joy, ecstasy, love, transfiguration.

Christina Baldwin

If our principal treasure be as we profess, in things spiritual and heavenly, and woe unto us if it be not so! on them will our affections, and consequently our desires and thoughts, be principally fixed.

The erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling....

Modern mass culture, aimed at the "consumer", the civilisation of prosthetics, is crippling people's souls, setting up barriers between man and the crucial questions of his existence, his consciousness of himself as a spiritual being.

Andrei Tarkovsky

A Muslim is he who carries the fear of God in his heart and tries, by following the ways of Islam, to rise in spiritual stature: and not merely he who happens to have been born in a Muslim house and bears a Muslim name.

Dating is not only a wonderful time of life, but also a context for enormous spiritual and personal growth. You learn so much about yourself, others, God, love, spirituality, and life through dating. Done well, it can be fulfilling in and of itself. Done well, it can be one of the most fun and rewarding aspects of your life. Done well, it can lead to a good marriage.

Later that year I finally got it. I began to realize that my spiritual life had been too ethereal, too disconnected. To follow Jesus and to be close to Jesus meant that I needed to seek out the company of poor and struggling people.

The desert is a spiritual place, we vaguely understand, and the sea the mere playground of our hedonism.

This conversation taught me that some of us can meet reality on this side of the grave. I do not envy them. Such adventures may profit the disembodied soul, but as long as I have flesh and blood I pray that my grossness preserve me. Our lower nature has its dreams. Mine is of a certain farm, windy but fruitful, half-way between the deserted moorland and the uninhabitable sea. Hither, at rare intervals, she should descend and he ascend, to shatter their spiritual communion by one caress.

We are living in a very exciting and powerful time. On the deepest level of consciousness, a radical spiritual transformation is taking place. I believe that on a worldwide level, we are being challenged to let go of our present way of life and create an entirely new one. We are, in fact, in the process of destroying our old world and building a new one in its place.

I don't dare attach myself to a spiritual strategy. I don't dare do that. I've got some work to do. Take care of business. I am ready to die. I hope it's not too uncomfortable. That's about it for me.

Physical life is characterized by defensiveness, whereas spiritual life is just the opposite.

Eben Alexander (author)