“One day, Ananda, who had been thinking deeply about things for a while, turned to the Buddha and exclaimed: "Lord, I've been thinking - spiritual friendship is at least half of the spiritual life!" The Buddha replied: "Say not so, Ananda, say not so. Spiritual friendship is the whole of the spiritual life!"”
Gautama Buddha, Samyutta Nikaya, Mahāvagga, verse 2
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Gautama Buddha 121
philosopher, reformer and the founder of Buddhism -563–-483 BCRelated quotes

The Ageless Wisdom, An Introduction to Humanity's Spiritual Legacy (1996)

““Ah, yes, the spiritual realm.” In those days “spiritual” was my least favorite word. It still is.”
Source: The Philosopher's Apprentice (2008), Chapter 7 (p. 141)
Love is not a feeling ~ The Article (1995)
Context: All feelings are false and deceptive. [... ] Enlightenment is to be emptied (not empty) of feelings and thus at one with the pure sensation of divine being. And that pretty well sums up the whole spiritual process. But the spiritual process is so little understood that people don't realise their feelings are personal and false and have been misleading them all their life. If that's not true, why is humanity still unenlightened and basically unhappy after all this time - when enlightenment is the completely natural, sensational state of being every moment?

Source: The Spiritual Life (1947), p. 264

“I think there’s something spiritual in a very day-to-day, mundane existence.”
As quoted in "Miranda July Is Totally Not Kidding" by Katrina Onstad, in The New York Times (14 July 2011) http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/17/magazine/the-make-believer.html?_r=0&pagewanted=all
Context: I think there’s something spiritual in a very day-to-day, mundane existence. It’s impossible to articulate, and it’s happening now, almost like a perverse secret.... That’s always sort of fascinating to me.