Quotes About Spirituality

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.

[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.

Be radical! The reason you feel so miserable is because you put spirituality in a form. You boxed it, franchised it. You decided spirituality was a certain way but then you got stuck in the way.

Spirituality is deeply personal. Yet, society has to face the fact that certain faiths celebrate spirituality through an overt expression of inner convictions.

Every religious tradition on which we draw has a reverence for life. We are a part of an intricate web of life. Every tradition on which we draw teaches that the ultimate expression of our spirituality is our action. Deep spirituality leads to action in the world. A deep reverence for life, love of nature's complex beauty and sense of intimate connection with the cosmos leads inevitably to a commitment to work for environmental and social justice.

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.

Spirituality does not mean going away from life. Spirituality means becoming alive in the fullest possible way so you are not just alive on the surface, you are alive to the core.

When we start helping the weak and the poor to rise everyone will begin to change. Those who have power and riches will start to become more humble, and those who are rising up will leave behind their need to be victims, their need to be angry or depressed....This is the spirituality of life, that helps people to rise up and take their place. It is not a spirituality of death. Jesus wants those who have been crushed to rise up and those who have power to discover that there is another road, a road of sharing and compassion.

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.

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.

Just believe in yourself and to find spirituality that’s going to carry you. Because all the rest is just fluff.

Spirituality and faith are at the core of who I am. I was born to deeply religious parents who were able to give me that rock solid foundation in the church and in my faith which really has served me so well.

Indian spirituality, proclaimed that the true Godhead was beyond number and count; that it had many manifestations which did not exclude or repel each other but included each other, and went together in friendship; that it was approached in different ways and through many symbols; that it resided in the hearts of its devotees. Here there were no chosen people, no exclusive prophethoods, no privileged churches and fraternities and ummas. The message was subversive of all religions based on exclusive claims.

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.

I remember when we had to pick our major freshman year, I chose comparative religion. It came to me out of the blue. I am amazed at how interested I still am in those ideas, especially the way spirituality is expressed in the world and in art.

My spiritual life is an interesting thing. It's pretty private. I was raised Catholic in the Baptist Bible belt, so my spirituality was challenged and very much a private thing and it continues to be.

Beyond being Jewish, I've always found myself to be very much in tune with spirituality.

What I would argue is that real spirituality is the ability to keep encountering two opposite thoughts at the same time and still maintain some kind of morality and perspective in the world. It is not the elimination of one side of the equation or the elimination of what you don't like; it is the investigation of everything.

Spirituality is based on development of character and philosophy.

Oh, I think it's definitely spiritual. All music is. I think it's maybe one of the highest forms of spirituality.

The children, each of those kids is in touch with nature and traditional aboriginal culture so a very important part of getting performances from them was just letting them be and trying to capture the unique spirituality that was in each of them.

The sexual act - separating that from love itself - is centered solely in the body, whereas spirituality is connected to the whole self. Whether it's a female, a taste, or a sound, all these beautiful things affect our self. We are the perceivers of beauty, and that's why sex doesn't quite go far enough. You can go much further with the spiritual.

The new physics provides a modern version of ancient spirituality. In a universe made out of energy, everything is entangled; everything is one.

I think there's some pretty amazing language in the Bible. The thing that's always been interesting to me about religion is that compared to the more modern spirituality, the West Coast pseudo-Buddhist thing that people go for these days, actual Buddhism and Islam have been looking at these philosophical questions, at really hard questions, for a long time. There's a lot of stuff that philosophy doesn't talk about, and in the secular world, a lot of times, people don't talk about these ideas, and that was always really interesting for me.

Courage is the hallmark of spirituality. Courage comes when you love yourself for who you are.

It is important to learn that love is your life, love is spirituality.

It’s all too easy to turn the fight of faith into sanctification-by-checklist. Take care of a few bad habits, develop a couple good ones, and you’re set. But a moral checklist doesn’t take into consideration the idols of the hearts. It may not even have the gospel as part of the equation. And inevitably, checklist spirituality is highly selective. So you end up feeling successful at sanctification because you stayed away from drugs, lost weight, served at the soup kitchen, and renounced Styrofoam. But you’ve ignored gentleness, humility, joy, and sexual purity.

The Christian life is not about pleasing God the finger-shaker and judge. It is not about believing now or being good now for the sake of heaven later. It is about entering a relationship in the present that begins to change everything now. Spirituality is about this process: the opening of the heart to the God who is already here.

I think the spirit survives when we die, and nothing is wasted in nature and just as our material body disintegrates and becomes something else in the soil. The spirit becomes something else, reunites with a spiritual force that is out there in the universe. Not as individuals but as part of this spirituality.

Ultimately, love is only possible for humans insofar as they can achieve some comprehension of their place and their duties and their values and their significance within the whole of life, of society, of spirituality, of history, of nature. In all merely partial or fragmentary perspectives, there necessarily remain undigested irrational factors, surds that one is merely tolerating and not truly respecting as essential and integral to the whole of what we are.

Spirituality is worthless if it's not practical. Music is my work. I am a musician.

Even though the American Indian Movement on a national-international scale has proven to be extremely dysfunctional, the American Indian Movement I was associated with I'm very proud of. We were a revolutionary, militant organization whose purpose was spirituality first, and that's how I want to be remembered.

Also I have an interest in spirituality and it opens-up so many different areas of Indian life.

God is the one who satisfies the passion for justice, the longing for spirituality, the hunger for relationship, the yearning for beauty. And God, the true God, is the God we see in Jesus of Nazareth, Israel's Messiah, the world's true Lord.

I think spirituality, even if there's no God, even if there's nothing - I consider myself relatively spiritual. I believe in a God. I don't know what it's like, but I do believe in it. It's the only thing that makes any sense. Maybe I'm just looking for order in the chaos. Though, I do believe in Evolution and I do believe in science.

I tend to place my own value in spirituality rather than religiosity.

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

Archaeological materials are not mute. They speak their own language. And they need to be used for the great source they are to help unravel the spirituality of those of our ancestors who predate the Indo-Europeans by many thousands of years.

Each generation has to reinvent spirituality.

Many people think spirituality has nothing to do with success or accomplishing - that it's something you do with removal, with leaving the world.

In the century now dawning, spirituality, visionary consciousness, and the ability to build and mend human relationships will be more important for the fate and safety of this nation than our capacity to forcefully subdue an enemy. Creating the world we want is a much more subtle but more powerful mode of operation than destroying the one we don't want.

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.

Western science is approaching a paradigm shift of unprecedented proportions, one that will change our concepts of reality and of human nature, bridge the gap between ancient wisdom and modern science, and reconcile the differences between Eastern spirituality and Western pragmatism.

Now, a lot of people look for answers in spirituality or different texts, but for me this is life. This is what life is: the passage of time. It's not about how to pass the time, but about the acceptance of the time passing. I know people think of my work as spiritual, but really it's just that I consume time. That's all.

The spirituality that we need to develop for social change is one that mobilizes us for social change.

A dreaded society is not a civilized society. The most progressive and powerful society in the civilized sense, is a society which has recognized its ethos, and come to terms with the past and the present, with religion and science. With modernism and mysticism, with materialism and spirituality; a society free of tension, a society rich in culture. Such a society cannot come with hocus-pocus formulas and with fraud. It has to flow from the depth of a divine search.

Spirituality is committing suicide. Consciousness is attempting to will itself out of existence.