Quotes About Spirituality

[W]omen's magazines know that more than two thirds of women pray each day so they tend to promote "spirituality" which is warm, soft, fuzzy, and "me-centered, " rather than religion, which is definitely not. Shot with a soft-focus lens, spirituality in women's media has morphed into another method of stress reduction. Lulling and inoffensive, spirituality is more about taking long walks and buying $65 Jo Malone scented candles than making ethical decisions or moral judgments. It's another way to calm ourselves, refresh ourselves, or applaud ourselves.

I want neither a terrorist spirituality that keeps me in a perpetual state of fright about being in right relationship with my heavenly Father nor a sappy spirituality that portrays God as such a benign teddy bear that there is no aberrant behavior or desire of mine that he will not condone. I want a relationship with the Abba of Jesus, who is infinitely compassionate with my brokenness and at the same time an awesome, incomprehensible, and unwieldy Mystery.

I'm a spiritual person, I believe that if you read the bible, you get what you want from it. But, when you actually read it, you see the beauty, spirituality, the joy and love and what makes us godly. And then if you read between the lines of all the same books, you always see the human influence in the writing... it's not all about religiousness, it's about spirituality.

The word spirit comes from the Latin word for "breath" - spiritu - and the origin of the word spirituality has to do with breath and life force, the mysteries of the ancients and all this. The word is very suspect in much of the art world - the Western art world. Certainly, spirituality has become divorced from religious.

It used to be that Christian institutions and systems of dogma sustained the spiritual life of Christians. Increasingly, spirituality itself is what sustains everything else. Alan Jones is a pioneer in reimagining a Christian faith that emerges from authentic spirituality. His work stimulates and encourages me deeply

Traditional spirituality often made pleasure, joy, good feelings. the things to overcome. It said you couldn't just indulge in your desires; that would be selfish. Anyone who has been in a spiritual community recognizes the dangers of this kind of joyless spirituality, where everything is somber and heavy and serious. We recognize that as kind of a trap, a false path.

Don't be confused that my interest in religion, faith, and spirituality is driven by any sense of faith or spirituality of my own.

Traditional people of Indian nations have interpreted the two roads that face the light-skinned race as the road to technology and the road to spirituality. We feel that the road to technology.... has led modern society to a damaged and seared earth. Could it be that the road to technology represents a rush to destruction, and that the road to spirituality represents the slower path that the traditional native people have traveled and are now seeking again? The earth is not scorched on this trail. The grass is still growing there.

I don't go to church any more, but I think that Catholicism is rather like the brand they use on cattle: I feel so formed in that Catholic mould that I don't think I could adopt any other form of spirituality. I still get feelings of consolation about churches.

Spirituality is the intersection of three paths: letting go of ego, an unconditional yes to the conditions of human existence, and an immeasurable compassion.

The Christian doctrine is one that is both about individual spirituality and a parallel commitment to social justice.

Spirituality is allowing compassion and love to flourish. When belongness begins, corruption ends.

A work becomes a work of art when one re-evaluates the values of nature and adds one's own spirituality.

Possibly the words materialism and spirituality express two sides of one and the same fact.

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.

You may have practical ethics and that kind of thing, but there is no spirituality in any aspect of our Western civilization. Our religious life is ethical, not mystical. The mystery has gone and society is disintegrating as a result.

Interestingly, God's remedy for Elijah's depression was not a refresher course in theology but food and sleep... Before God spoke to him at all, Elijah was fed twice and given a good chance to sleep. Only then, and very gently, did God confront him with his error. This is always God's way. Having made us as human beings, He respects our humanness and treats us with integrity. That is, He treats us true to the truth of who we are. It is human beings and not God who have made spirituality impractical.

The word "spiritual" normally means something that's distinct from the fleshly or the material. It's not of the world. But that version of spirituality is bankrupt today. It had its use when the program of science divested matter from the spiritual qualities - - the qualities of a self, or of a being. When science divested the world of those qualities and made it into just a thing, rather than a self, it gave us license to treat it as just a thing, and not as something sacred, conscious, alive, intelligent. So this is tied into the whole trajectory of our civilization.

Thinking well is integral to acting righteously. Truth and spirituality are of a piece: to know the truth is to do it. There is no dichotomy between the two. To be spiritual is to know/do the truth.

In order to experience everyday spirituality, we need to remember that we are spiritual beings spending some time in a human body.

As for myself, I do not believe in loggers, I believe in trees. I do not believe in fishermen, I believe in fish. I do not believe in miners, I believe in the rocks beneath my feet. I do not believe in pie in the sky spirituality, I believe in rainbows, rivers, mountains, and moss. I do not believe in environmentalists, I believe in the environment. I am a proud traitor to my species in alliance with my mother the Earth in opposition to those who would destroy her, those parasites who believe the Earth is here to serve human interests.

I think religion is often very different from spirituality. Religion is often about rules and people trying to control our lives who are actually very unspiritual... God can be found anywhere, and in fact, everywhere. And you don

A quest for knowledge is not a war with faith; spirituality is not usually an infelicitous amalgam of superstition and philistinism; and moral relativism, taken outside midfield, leads inexorably both to heresy and to secular wickedness, which are often identical.

...there is something wrong with any spirituality that does not inspire selfless concern for others

Suffering is part and parcel of the human condition, but suffering can either embitter or ennoble us. It can ennoble us and become a spirituality of transformation when we find meaning in it.

Somehow, we have gotten off track from the basics of health and spirituality, and we get in our own way.

Walking the spiritual path properly is a very subtle process; it is not something to jump into naively. There are numerous sidetracks which leades to a distorted, ego-centered version of spirituality; we can deceive ourselves into thinking we are developing spiritually when instead we are strengthening our egocentricity through spiritual techniques. This fundamental distortion may be referred to as spiritual materialism

I approach poetry and spirituality like literary nitroglycerin -- a little can do a lot and you better damn well be careful with it.

I am not saying renounce sex, I am saying transform it. It need not remain just biological: bring some spirituality to it. While making love, meditate too. While making love, be prayerful. Love should not be just a physical act; pour your soul into it.

Nothing is more repulsive than a furtively prurient spirituality; it is just as unsavoury as gross sensuality.

Hollywood is a place where if you abide by the rules and laws, you can get depressed. That's why faith and spirituality is a higher law.

Do not fret because the world looks with suspicion at every new attempt, even though it be in the path of spirituality.

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.

Spirituality tells the seeker not to live in the hoary past, not to live in the remote future, but to live in the immediacy of today, in the eternal Now.

There are so many intellectual and moral angels battling for rationalism, good citizenship, and pure spirituality; so many and such eminent ones, so very vocal and authoritative! The poor devil in man needs all the support and advocacy he can get. The artist is his natural champion. When an artist deserts to the side of the angels, it is the most odious of treasons.

Maintaining spirituality and humanism are the keys to success. Its a balance.

To be a successful missionary one must have the Spirit of the Lord. We are also taught that the Spirit will not dwell in unclean tabernacles. Therefore, one of the first things a missionary must do to gain spirituality is to make sure his own personal life is in order.

My favorite: Spirituality is a domain of awareness.

Perhaps people need to understand some history here. Rene Descartes, in the late 16th, early 17th century, postulated that body, mind, physicality and spirituality belonged to different realms of reality that didn't interact. On a positive side, it got the Inquisition off the backs of the intellectuals and they quit burning them at the stake for disagreeing with the Church.

So I think the Guru can be a delusion. But everything can be deluding. The thing central about the Guru in the West is that he represents an alien principle of the spirit, namely, that you don't follow your own path; you follow a given path. And that's totaly contrary to the Western Spirit! Our spirituality is of the individual quest, individual realization- authenticity in your life out of your own center. So you must take the message of the East, assimilate it to your own dimension and to your own thrust of life, and not get pulled off track.

I always feel there is a link between music and spirituality.

The premises being thus settled, I proceed to observe that the concatenation of self-existence, proceeding in a reciprocal duplicate ratio, naturally produces a problematical dialogism, which in some measure proves that the essence of spirituality may be referred to the second predicable.

You know, in America, Christian fundamentalism vs. science. You know, be it teaching Darwinian evolutionary theory or stem cell res- You know, the whole thing, and then the issue of women being educated in Middle Eastern - I mean, it just seems so contemporary. In terms of spirituality, it's interesting because I actually think (her character in Agora) Hypatia is very spiritual.

If we are one in purpose, spirit, principle and faith, then it doesn't really matter if we are always of the same opinion. Opinions change and can be easily altered by time, experience, and circumstance. But principles, purposes, spirituality, and faith are enduring values that can bind us as one despite disagreement or dispute.

The process of liberation brings with it a profound conflict. Having the project be clear is not enough. What is necessary is a spirituality of resistance and of renewed hope to turn ever back to the struggle in the face of the defeats of the oppressed.

I live my life through the prism of capitalism and physiological limits and eventualities. In all of that, there is no spirituality required. No God and karma is needed for the numbers. I live my life by the numbers. Not only am I an American, I am an Americanist.

I see too many people who jump into spirituality as a shelter to hide from reality. It doesn't work that way. The way it works is for the spirit behind you to follow you wherever you go, like a loyal soldier, and show you how to face up to adversity. If you can't face adversity, you will get locked into a new age perception that everything is fine when it isn't. That makes you vulnerable to being exploited by the person who comes along and says, "I am a psychic. I have studied with this guy or that guy, and I know what you should do".

My grandfather was a voodoo priest. A lot of my life dealt with spirituality. I can close my eyes and remember where I come from.