Quotes About Spirituality

To accept yourself wherever. you are.... And don't think in terms of competition! You need not be anywhere else. Wherever you are, if you can be happy there, you have become religious, you have become spiritual. Spirituality knows no competition, spirituality knows no greed, spirituality knows no ambition - because spirituality means desirelessness.

Jesuits make a vow of obedience to the Pope. But if the Pope is a Jesuit, perhaps he has to make a vow of obedience to the General of the Jesuits! I don’t know how to resolve this … I feel a Jesuit in my spirituality; in the spirituality of the Exercises, the spirituality deep in my heart.

How can we find spiritual meaning in a scientific worldview? Spirituality is a way of being in the world, a sense of one’s place in the cosmos, a relationship to that which extends beyond oneself. . . . Does scientific explanation of the world diminish its spiritual beauty? I think not. Science and spirituality are complementary, not conflicting; additive, not detractive. Anything that generates a sense of awe may be a source of spirituality. Science does this in spades. (158-159)

Spirituality becomes a commodity to be bought and sold. So spirituality has to be disciplined by social justice.

Spirituality is best manifested on the ground, not in the air. Rapturous day-dreams, flights of heavenly fancy, longings to see the Invisible, are less expensive and less expressive than the plain doing of duty. To have bread excite thankfulness and a drink of water send the heart to God is better than sighs for the unattainable. To plow a straight furrow on Monday or dust a room well on Tuesday or kiss a bumped forehead on Wednesday is worth more than the most ecstatic thrill under Sunday eloquence. Spirituality is seeing God in common things, and showing God in common tasks.

Spirituality is the science that teaches us how to achieve peace of mind and supreme satisfaction. Right now we are hankering after many, many things, but nothing we get satisfies us. Spirituality tells us that satisfaction can be found only if we lead a good and divine life-a life of simplicity, purity and humility.

Sadly enough, there is a kind of an anti-intellectualism among many Christians: spirituality is falsely pitted against intellectual comprehension as though they stood in a dichotomy. Such anti-intellectualism cuts away at the very heart of the Christian message. Of course, there is a false intellectualism which does destroy the work of the Holy Spirit. But it does not arise when men wrestle honestly with honest questions and then see that the Bible has the answers. This does not oppose true spirituality.

I think that spirituality is important for all people to develop. I don't mean there necessarily has to be a religious aspect to spirituality. Some people are spiritual in a religious way, other people are spiritual in their work and in their art and in their treatment of other people.

An important distinction can be made between religion and spirituality. Religion [is] concerned with faith in the claims to salvation of one faith tradition... Spirituality is concerned with qualities of the human spirit, love and compassion, patience, tolerance, forgiveness, contentment, a sense of responsibility, a sense of harmony, that bring happiness both to self.

I prefer to learn everything through music. If you want divinity, the music in every human being and their love for music is pretty much it. It's the big indication of their spirituality and their ability to love and make love, or feel pain or joy, and really manifest it, really be real.

Thus when I have to summarize naturalized spirituality in a single phrase, it is this: the thoughtful love of life.

I realize that I've had a very idyllic vision of what spirituality looks like. Honestly, most of Western culture has an idyllic and simplified idea of what enlightenment entails.

Materialism and spirituality are two pretty racquets with which charlatans in cap and gown make the same ball fly.

When, and how, and at what stage of our development did spirituality and our strange notions of religion arise? the need for worship which is nothing more than our frightened refuge into propitiation of a Creator we do not understand? A detective story, the supreme Who-done-it, written in indecipherable hieroglyphics, no Rosetta stone supplied by the consummate Mystifier to tease us poor fumbling unravellers of his plot.

Religion should unite all hearts and cause wars and disputes to vanish from the face of the earth; it should give birth to spirituality, and bring light and life to every soul. If religion becomes a cause of dislike, hatred and division, it would be better to be without it... Any religion which is not a cause of love and unity is no religion.

To me spirituality needs an honest individuality. It does not allow any kind of dependence. It creates a freedom for itself, whatever the cost. It is never in the crowd but alone, because the crowd has never found any truth. The truth has been found only in people's aloneness.

Spirituality lies in regarding existence merely as a vehicle for contemplation, and contemplation merely a vehicle for joy.

Every noble impulse, every unselfish expression of love, every surrender of self to something higher than self, every loyalty to an ideal, every fine courage of the soul – by doing good for good’s sake – that is spirituality. –

We learn by doing, not just by thinking. So I feel like beyond Buddhism, or Hinduism, or Judaism, or Christianity we need today to think about a global spirituality. We need to make it very personal and transformative for one self, and each other, together for those who are interested.

Very often when I see people who are perceived to be, or who call themselves progressives, sometimes I see an imbalance. Yes I understand the courage in their mind but I don't see the spirituality in their heart, good you are questioning the limits, but what about yourself, are you also liberating yourself?

Even if we profess to be non-judgmental, there's an inherent judgmentality and hierarchy in which the spiritual person, the conscious person, the mindful person, is more developed than the typical truck driver or waitress or heroin addict. This is a red flag, another problem built into the concept of spirituality. The truth is that every person you meet is in some way more developed than you are, and that the multiple modes of development that a human being can pursue require the whole of humanity to pursue. We're in this together. Enlightenment is a collective effort.

Who ever thought that intimacy and spirituality [whatever that means] were freedoms? And if intimacy is, one would think Freedom of Intimacy is abridged rather than expanded by marriage. Ask the nearest hippie.

...I want my spirituality to rid me of hate, not give me reason for it.

Spirituality is no different from what weve been doing for two thousand years just by going to church and receiving the sacraments, being baptized, learning to pray, and reading Scriptures rightly. Its just ordinary stuff.

It is precisely women’s experience of God that this world lacks. A world that does not nurture its weakest, does not know God the birthing mother. A world that does not preserve the planet, does not know God the creator. A world that does not honor the spirit of compassion, does not know God the spirit. God the lawgiver, God the judge, God the omnipotent being have consumed Western spirituality and, in the end, shriveled its heart.

I think being really connected to a higher power, of having a spirituality to me, has been really good for me and I pray all the time.

Nowhere does one become more convinced of the strong hold which Freemasonry takes upon the minds and lives of those aging workers in the Craft who have attained its highest honors and of their firm belief in the power of its teachings to purify the soul of men and raise them to a new dignity and to greater heights of spirituality and practical morality.

Spirituality belongs to the eternal, and religion belongs to the temporal. Religion belongs to people's behavior. It is really what Pavlov, Skinner, Delgado and others call a conditioning of the behavior. The child is brought up by Christians - then he is conditioned in one way, he becomes a Christian.

Religion is not something I like to talk about publicly. One reason is the politics, but also I think spirituality is deeply personal.

To play June, I had an immediate connect with her background and culture. We grew up with the same religion and shared a lot of the same values of family and spirituality. But I was really so inspired by what a modern woman she was.

All the manifestations of love can be seen as a connection with our spirituality.

Two attempts have been made in the world to found social life: the one was upon religion, and the other was upon social necessity. The one was founded upon spirituality, the other upon materialism; the one upon transcendentalism, the other upon realism.

Spirituality is not primarily about values and ethics, not about exhortations to do right or live well. The spiritual traditions are primarily about reality...an effort to penetrate the illusions of the external world and to name its underlying truth.

In Benedictine spirituality, work is what we do to continue what God wanted done....God goes on creating through us. Consequently a life spent serving God must be a life spent giving to others what we have been given.

We are all born with extraordinary powers of imagination, intelligence, feeling, intuition, spirituality, and of physical and sensory awareness. For the most part, we use only a fraction of these powers, and some not at all.

Every characteristic absence of spirituality, every piece of common vulgarity, is due to an inability to resist a stimulus - you have to react, you follow every impulse.

If Spirituality is that you're humble in the face of forces greater than you and you believe those forces are more inclined toward being good than being bad, then I'm a spiritual person.

They had both noticed that a life of dissipation sometimes gave to a face the look of gaunt suffering spirituality that a life of asceticism was supposed to give and quite often did not.

I used to teach psychology, and I don't do that anymore. I teach spirituality. And the way that I teach now is just by listening. I listen a lot.

All great spirituality is about what we do with our pain. If we do not transform our pain, we will transmit it to those around us.

Humility is a fertile soil where spirituality grows and produces the fruit of inspiration to know what to do. It gives access to divine power to accomplish what must be done. An individual motivated by a desire for praise or recognition will not qualify to be taught by the Spirit. An individual who is arrogant or who lets his or her emotions influence decisions will not be powerfully led by the Spirit.

I guess I stayed with the faith. I mean, organized religion is not something that I've maintained a direct connection to in my life, but the spirituality of it has had an indelible impact on my life and remains with me.

All of us emanate from a source of well-being. If you do not have well-being in your life, physically or emotionally, then you have to look at what kind of energies, thoughts, and spirituality you have chosen that take you away from your source.

Authentic spirituality... does not render the self content, it renders it undone.

Those who have little interest in spirituality shouldn’t think that human inner values don’t apply to you. The inner peace of an alert and calm mind are the source of real happiness and good health. Our human intelligence tells us which of our emotions are positive and helpful and which are damaging and to be restrained or avoided.

Whenever you wash dishes, cook, or clean, if you make no sound, this is smartness itself. A person who enters a house and makes a lot of noise is revealing a lack of spirituality; even cats and dogs do not make unnecessary sounds, and man as he naturally is does not make any either.

Yet again, the more you strive for some kind of perfection or mastery—in morals, in art or in spirituality—the more you see that you are playing a rarified and lofty form of the old ego-game, and that your attainment of any height is apparent to yourself and to others only by contrast with someone else's depth or failure.

Spirituality is ultimate greed. You don't just want a piece of creation - you want the source of creation.