Quotes about spirituality
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“Capitalism has resulted in material well-being but spiritual bankruptcy.”

Jeffrey Eugenides book The Virgin Suicides

Source: The Virgin Suicides

“Today is mine. Tomorrow is none of my business. If I peer anxiously into the fog of the future, I will strain my spiritual eyes so that I will not see clearly what is required of me now.”

Elisabeth Elliot (1926–2015) American missionary

Source: Keep a Quiet Heart

Business, Future

“Spiritual progress is like a detoxification.”

Marianne Williamson (1952) American writer

“The closer you get to real matter, rock air fire and wood, boy, the more spiritual the world is.”

Jack Kerouac book The Dharma Bums

Source: The Dharma Bums

World, Boy

“A man of my spiritual intensity does not eat corpses.”

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright

George Bernard Shaw, quoted by Hesketh Pearson, George Bernard Shaw: His Life and Personality, 1942
1940s and later

“Spirituality is not about being fixed; it is about God's being present in the mess of our unfixedness. (Messy Spirituality)”

Mike Yaconelli (1942–2003) American theologian

God

“Our whole spiritual transformation brings us to the point where we realize that in our own being, we are enough.”

Ram Dass (1931–2019) American contemporary spiritual teacher and the author of the 1971 book Be Here Now

“Boredom between two people doesn't come from being together physically. It comes from being apart mentally and spiritually.”

Richard Bach (1936) American spiritual writer

Source: The Bridge Across Forever: A True Love Story

People

“Happiness cannot be traveled to, owned, earned, worn or consumed. Happiness is the spiritual experience of living every minute with love, grace, and gratitude.”

Denis Waitley (1933) American writer

Happy, Heart Touching, Love, Travel

“To reach back and help, and expect neither reward nor even thanks.

To reach back and help, because that is what spiritual beings do.”

Brian L. Weiss

Source: Messages from the Masters: Tapping into the Power of Love

Help

“the conspicuous consumption of limited resources has yet to be accepted widely as a spiritual error, or even bad manners”

Barbara Kingsolver book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life

Source: Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life

Error

“Stealing money from humans is rewarding both financially and spiritually.”

Kresley Cole American writer

Source: Dreams of a Dark Warrior

Money

“One needs no strange spiritual faith to worship the earth.”

John Cowper Powys (1872–1963) British writer, lecturer and philosopher

Faith

“When I die, don't come, I wouldn't want a leaf
to turn away from the sun -- it loves it there.
There's nothing so spiritual about being happy
but you can't miss a day of it, because it doesn't last.”

Frank O'Hara (1926–1966) American poet, art critic and writer

Love, Sun, Happiness

“Like silence after noise, or cool, clear water on a hot, stuffy day, Emptiness cleans out the messy mind and charges up the batteries of spiritual energy. Many people are afraid of Emptiness, however, because it reminds them of Loneliness.”

Benjamin Hoff book The Tao of Pooh

Source: The Tao of Pooh

People, Silence, Water, Loneliness

“Our Generation has had no Great war, no Great Depression. Our war is spiritual. Our depression is our lives.”

Chuck Palahniuk Fight Club

Source: Fight Club

Depressing, War

“We are not Human Beings experiencing spiritual lives, we are spiritual beings experiencing human lives.”

Oprah Winfrey (1954) American businesswoman, talk show host, actress, producer, and philanthropist

“What I'm asking you to entertain is that there is nothing we need to believe on insufficient evidence in order to have deeply ethical and spiritual lives.”

Sam Harris (1967) American author, philosopher and neuroscientist

“Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality.”

Carl Sagan book The Demon-Haunted World

Source: The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

Science

“When there is a tendency to compartmentalize the spiritual and make it resident in a certain type of life only, the spiritual is apt gradually to be lost.”

Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964) American novelist, short story writer

Source: Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

Life

“Conservatism is not about tradition and morality, hasn't been for many decades… It is about the putative biological and spiritual superiority of the wealthy.”

Greg Bear (1951) American writer best known for science fiction

“We have artists with no scientific knowledge and scientists with no
artistic knowledge and both with no spiritual sense of gravity at all,
and the result is not just bad, it is ghastly.”

Robert M. Pirsig book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

Knowledge, Sense

“Life is a spiritual dance and that our unseen partner has steps to teach us if we will allow ourselves to be led. The next time you are restless, remind yourself it is the universe asking 'Shall we dance?”

Julia Cameron (1948) American writer

Life, Universe, Time, Dance

“To become a happy person have a clean soul, eyes that see romance in the commonplace, a child’s heart, and spiritual simplicity.”

Norman Vincent Peale book The Power of Positive Thinking

Source: The Power of Positive Thinking

Soul, Heart, Personality, Happiness

“All spiritual journeys are martyrdoms”

Jean Cocteau (1889–1963) French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, boxing manager and filmmaker

“The English are not a very spiritual people, so they invented cricket to give them some idea of eternity.”

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright

People, Idea

“The fact that I can plant a seed and it becomes a flower, share a bit of knowledge and it becomes another's, smile at someone and receive a smile in return, are to me continual spiritual exercises.”

Leo Buscaglia (1924–1998) Motivational speaker, writer

Smile, Exercises, Flowers, Knowledge

“It demands great spiritual resilience not to hate the hater whose foot is on your neck, and an even greater miracle of perception and charity not to teach your child to hate.”

James Baldwin book The Fire Next Time

Source: The Fire Next Time

Hate

“You guys looking for my dad? People are always, like, looking for him, and he's never around. Daddy is so not here. And I mean that literally and spiritually.”

Eoin Colfer (1965) Irish author of children's books

Source: The Eternity Code

People, Guy

“Public libraries have been a mainstay of my life. They represent an individual's right to acquire knowledge; they are the sinews that bind civilized societies the world over. Without libraries, I would be a pauper, intellectually and spiritually.”

James A. Michener (1907–1997) American author

Life, World, Knowledge

“Every time you don't follow your inner guidance, you feel a loss of energy, loss of power, a sense of spiritual sadness.”

Shakti Gawain (1948–2018) Author

Sadness, Feeling, Sense, Loss

“The two hardest tests on the spiritual road are the patience to wait for the right moment and the courage not to be disappointed with what we encounter.”

Paulo Coelho (1947) Brazilian lyricist and novelist

Variant: You have passed through the two hardest tests on the spiritual road: the patience to wait for the right moment and the courage not to be disappointed with what you encounter.
Source: Veronika Decides to Die

Courageous, Disappointment, Courage, Waiting

“Great men are they who see that spiritual is stronger than any material force, that thoughts rule the world. No hope so bright but is the beginning of its own fulfilment.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

Progress of Culture Phi Beta Kappa Address (July 18, 1867) <br class="br">1870s, Society and Solitude (1870), Books, Letters and Social Aims http://www.rwe.org/comm/index.php?option=com_content&task=category&sectionid=5&id=74&Itemid=149 (1876)

Men, World, Hope

“Worrying doesn't make any difference, but working does and spirituality gives one the strength to work”

Sri Sri Ravi Shankar (1956) spiritual leader

“She was a dark, unenduring little flower - yet he thought he detected in her some quality of spiritual reticence, of strength drawn from her passive acceptance of all things. In this he was mistaken.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book The Beautiful and Damned

Source: The Beautiful and Damned

Flowers

“You do not need to work to become spiritual. Youspiritual; you need only to remember that fact. Spirit is within you. God is within you. (67)”

Julia Cameron (1948) American writer

Source: God is No Laughing Matter

God

“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience, but are spiritual beings having a human experience.”

Robin S. Sharma (1965) Canadian self help writer

“There are many sources of spirituality; religion may be the most common, but it is by no means the only. Anything that generates a sense of awe may be a source of spirituality. Science does this in spades.”

Michael Shermer (1954) American science writer

Religion, Sense, Science

“We do not need more intellectual power, we need more spiritual power. We do not need more of the things that are seen, we need more of the things that are unseen.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

“Love is the grand prize and the garbage heap. Love is a spiritual root canal and the only thing that makes life worth living. Love is a little taste of always and a big bite of nothing. And love is everything in between these extremes.”

Robert Fulghum (1937) American writer

Source: True Love

Love, Life

“We don't have a great war in our generation, or a great depression, but we do, we have a great war of the spirit. We have a great revolution against the culture. The great depression is our lives. We have a spiritual depression.”

Chuck Palahniuk Fight Club

Source: Fight Club

War

“Want a reliable road to emotional and spiritual suicide? Spend your life trying to fit in.”

Brandon Mull (1974) American fiction writer

Life, Suicide

“Show me a man who lives alone and has a perpetually clean kitchen, and eight times out of nine I'll show you a man with detestable spiritual qualities.”

Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) American writer

Tales of ordinary madness (1967-83)

Time

“You are an infinite spiritual being having a temporary human experience.”

Wayne W. Dyer (1940–2015) American writer

“There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace.”

Aldo Leopold book A Sand County Almanac

“February: Good Oak”, p. 6.
Source: A Sand County Almanac, 1949, "January Thaw", "February: Good Oak" & "March: The Geese Return"

“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 book Sculpting in Time

Source: Sculpting in Time (1986), p. 42

People, Soul, Question

“To me, reason is as spiritual as anything else, the beauty of reason seems to me indelible and ineffable and numinous… the spirit is after all the same word we use to describe… essence”

Stephen Fry (1957) English comedian, actor, writer, presenter, and activist

Beauty

“We are all born with extraordinary powers of imagination, intelligence, feeling, intuition, spirituality, and of physical and sensory awareness. (p.9)”

Ken Robinson (1950) UK writer

Source: The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything

Feeling, Imagination, Intelligence

“I do not need the written code of a spiritual belief to act like a decent human being.”

Jim Butcher book Changes

Source: Changes

“Spiritual realization is theoretically the easiest thing and in practice the most difficult thing there is. It is the easiest because it is enough to think of God. It is the most difficult because human nature is forgetfulness of God.”

Frithjof Schuon (1907–1998) Swiss philosopher

Source: Spiritual Perspectives And Human Facts

God, Nature, Thinking, Forgetting

“My heart skipped a beat and then flat-out tripped over itself and fell on its face. Then my heart stood up, brushed itself off, took a deep breath and announced: "I want a spiritual teacher.”

Elizabeth Gilbert book Eat, Pray, Love

Source: Eat, Pray, Love

Teachers, Heart

“There doesn't need to be a God for me. There's something in people that's spiritual, that's godlike. I don't feel like doing things just because people say things, but I also don't really know if it's better to just not believe in anything, either.”

Angelina Jolie (1975) American actress, film director, and screenwriter

God, People, Feeling

“Reading is not simply an intellectual pursuit but an emotional and spiritual one. It lights the candle in the hurricane lamp of self; that's why it survives."

[, Newsweek Magazine, March 25, 2010]”

Anna Quindlen (1952) journalist, Novelist

Light, Reading

“Like those in the valley behind us, most people stand in sight of the spiritual mountains all their lives and never enter them, being content to listen to others who have been there and thus avoid the hardships.”

Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) American writer and philosopher

People, Mountain

“Getting to a higher spiritual level is like increasing your credit score. You get a lot more points for sinning and repenting than if you have no credit history at all.”

Lisa Kleypas (1964) American writer

Source: Smooth Talking Stranger

History

“You have to grow from the inside out. None can teach you, none can make you spiritual. There is no other teacher but your own soul.”

Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902) Indian Hindu monk and phylosopher

Pearls of Wisdom

Faith, Soul, Teachers

“In medieval times, if someone displayed the symptoms we now identify as boredom, that person was thought to be committing something called, a 'dangerous form of spiritual alienation' -- a devaluing of the world and its creator.”

Richard Louv (1949) American journalist

World, Time, Personality

“I would like to achieve a state of inner spiritual grace from which I could function and give as I was meant to in the eye of God.”

Anne Morrow Lindbergh book Gift from the Sea

Source: Gift from the Sea

God

“Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence, so that never again will Americans be free in their own country from the noise, the exhausts, the stinks of human and automotive waste. And so that never again can we have the chance to see ourselves single, separate, vertical and individual in the world, part of the environment of trees and rocks and soil, brother to the other animals, part of the natural world and competent to belong in it. … We need wilderness preserved — as much of it as is still left, and as many kinds — because it was the challenge against which our character as a people was formed. The reminder and the reassurance that it is still there is good for our spiritual health even if we never once in ten years set foot in it.”

Wallace Stegner (1909–1993) American historian, writer, and environmentalist

Wilderness Letter http://wilderness.org/bios/former-council-members/wallace-stegner (1960) <br class="br">Source: The Sound of Mountain Water

People, Health, Books, World

“A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1960s, Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam (1967)
Context: A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our present policies. On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life's roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be changed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth with righteous indignation. It will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say, "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war, "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

Death, Money

“Cleaning is considered a vital part of the training process in all traditional Japanese disciplines and is a required practice for any novice. It is accorded spiritual significance. Purifying an unclean place is believed to purify the mind.”

Mineko Iwasaki (1949) Japanese Geisha

Source: Geisha, a Life

Parting, Training

“All spiritual practices are illusions created by illusionists to escape illusion.”

Ram Dass (1931–2019) American contemporary spiritual teacher and the author of the 1971 book Be Here Now

“The best measure of a spiritual life is not its ecstasies but its obedience.”

Oswald Chambers (1874–1917) British missionary

Life

“Nature holds the key to our aesthetic, intellectual, cognitive and even spiritual satisfaction.”

Edward O. Wilson (1929) American biologist

Nature

“I've always been spiritual but I've never had a proper context, and it took me a while to find the proper context. It's hard to realize you can have any kind of relationship with God you want… and so I now have a punk rock relationship with God”

Billy Corgan (1967) American musician, songwriter, producer, and author

God

“Anxiety is the mark of spiritual insecurity.”

Thomas Merton (1915–1968) Priest and author

“Religion is for those who don't want to go to hell, and spirituality is for those who have already been there.”

Elizabeth Gilbert book Eat, Pray, Love

Source: Eat, Pray, Love

Religion, Hell

“Its easier to feel a little more spiritual with a couple of bucks in your pocket.”

Craig Ferguson (1962) Scottish-born American television host, stand-up comedian, writer, actor, director, author, producer and voice a…

Feeling

“Christian, n.: one who believes that the New Testament is a divinely inspired book admirably suited to the spiritual needs of his neighbor.”

Ambrose Bierce book The Devil's Dictionary

Source: The Devil's Dictionary (1911)
Context: Christian, n. One who believes that the New Testament is a divinely inspired book admirably suited to the spiritual needs of his neighbor. One who follows the teachings of Christ so long as they are not inconsistent with a life of sin.

Books

“He suddenly understood the message of so many spiritual teachers that the only revolution that can work is the inner transformation of every human being.”

Stanislav Grof (1931) Czech pychiatrist

Source: The Holotropic Mind: The Three Levels of Human Consciousness and How They Shape Our Lives

Teachers

“The deeper the Self-realization of a man, the more he influences the whole universe by his subtle spiritual vibrations, and the less he himself is affected by the phenomenal flux.”

Paramahansa Yogananda book Autobiography of a Yogi

Source: Autobiography of a Yogi

Universe

“We are not human beings on a spiritual journey. We are spiritual beings on a human journey.”

Stephen R. Covey (1932–2012) American educator, author, businessman and motivational speaker

Pierre Teilhard De Chardin, in The Phenomenon of Man [Le Phénomène Humain] (1955); Covey quotes this in Living the 7 Habits : Stories of Courage and Inspiration (2000), p. 47
Variant: We are not human beings on a spiritual journey. We are spiritual beings on a human journey.
A paraphrase of De Chardin's statement which has also become misattributed to Covey.
Misattributed
Variant: We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience.

“When every situation which life can offer is turned to the profit of spiritual growth, no situation can really be a bad one.”

Paul Brunton (1898–1981) British philosopher

Life

“All great spirituality is about what we do with our pain.”

Richard Rohr (1943) American spiritual writer, speaker, teacher, Catholic Franciscan priest

Source: Adam's Return: The Five Promises of Male Initiation

Pain

“Spiritual growth involves giving up the stories of your past so the universe can write a new one.”

Marianne Williamson (1952) American writer

Source: The Law of Divine Compensation: Mastering the Metaphysics of Abundance

Universe, Past

“To a drinker the sensation is real and pure and akin to something spiritual: you seek; in the bottle, you find.”

Caroline Knapp (1959–2002) American writer

Source: Drinking: A Love Story

“Even if work were not an economic necessity, it is a spiritual necessity.”

Neal A. Maxwell (1926–2004) Mormon leader

“Perhaps the most "spiritual" thing any of us can do is simply to look through our own eyes, see with eyes of wholeness, and act with integrity and kindness.”

Jon Kabat-Zinn (1944) American academic

Source: Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life

“Man (and woman) has an infinite capacity for self-development. Equally, he has an infinite capacity for self-destruction. A human being may be clinically alive and yet, despite all appearances, spiritually dead.”

Idries Shah book Learning How to Learn: Psychology and Spirituality in the Sufi Way

Source: Learning How to Learn: Psychology and Spirituality in the Sufi Way

Appearance, Dead

“Revolution is an art that I pursue rather than a goal I expect to achieve. Nor is this a source of dismay; a lost cause can be as spiritually satisfying as a victory.”

Robert A. Heinlein book The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress

Source: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

Art, Victory

“… 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.”

Anne Michaels book Fugitive Pieces

Source: Fugitive Pieces

Pain, Pleasure, Decision, Learning

“I don't profess any religion; I don't think it’s possible that there is a God; I have the greatest difficulty in understanding what is meant by the words ‘spiritual’ or ‘spirituality.'

[]”

Philip Pullman (1946) English author

God, Religion, Understanding, Thinking

“Sometimes I think there are only two instructions we need to follow to develop and deepen our spiritual life: slow down and let go.”

Oriah Mountain Dreamer (1954) Canadian author

Source: The Dance: Moving To the Rhythms of Your True Self

Life, Thinking

“Spiritual practices help us move from identifying with the ego to identifying with the soul. Old age does that for you too. It spiritualizes people naturally.”

Ram Dass (1931–2019) American contemporary spiritual teacher and the author of the 1971 book Be Here Now

People, Age, Soul, Nature

“Attachment to views is the greatest impediment to the spiritual path.”

Thich Nhat Hanh (1926) Religious leader and peace activist

Source: Old Path White Clouds: Walking in the Footsteps of the Buddha

“I guess if I had to pick a spiritual figurehead to possess the deed to the entirety of Earth, I'd go with Buddha, but only because he wouldn't want it.”

Sarah Vowell book Unfamiliar Fishes

Source: Unfamiliar Fishes

“It is hard to remember that you are a cherished spiritual being when you're burping up apple fritters and Cheetos.”

Anne Lamott (1954) Novelist, essayist, memoirist, activist

Source: Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith

“I found in myself, and still find, an instinct toward a higher, or, as it is named, spiritual life, as do most men, and another toward a primitive rank and savage one, and I reverence them both. I love the wild not less than the good.”

Henry David Thoreau book Walden ou la vie dans les bois

Source: Walden

Love, Life, Men

“There are two lives, the natural and the spiritual, and we must lose the one before we can participate in the other.”

William James book The Varieties of Religious Experience

Source: The Varieties of Religious Experience

Nature

“A nation or a civilization that continues to produce softminded men purchases its own spiritual death on an installment plan.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

Source: 1960s, Strength to Love (1963), Ch. 1 : A tough mind and a tender heart
Context: There is little hope for us until we become toughminded enough to break loose from the shackles of prejudice, half-truths, and downright ignorance. The shape of the world today does not permit us the luxury of softmindedness. A nation or a civilization that continues to produce softminded men purchases its own spiritual death on an installment plan.
But we must not stop with the cultivation of a tough mind. The gospel also demands a tender heart. … What is more tragic than to see a person who has risen to the disciplined heights of toughmindedness but has at the same time sunk to the passionless depths of hardheartedness?

Death, Men

“An a priori decision to eliminate spiritual intelligence from consideration is no more justifiable than a decision to admit it by fiat or on faith. After all, once one includes the understanding of the personal realm within a study of intelligence, such human proclivities as the spiritual must legitimately be considered. There certainly are no easy grounds for a decision, but several other intelligences deal with phenomena other than sheer physical matter. If the abstract realm of mathematics constitutes a reasonable area of intelligence (and few would challenge that judgment), why not the abstract realm of the spiritual?”

Howard Gardner (1943) American developmental psychologist

Source: Intelligence reframed: Multiple intelligences for the 21st century, 1999, p. 51

Faith, Intelligence, Mathematics, Understanding

“He who wishes to study the barometric level of spiritual freedom must examine the relationship of the state to its Jewish subjects.”

Moses Hess (1812–1875) German philosopher

Translation brought in Prophecy and Politics: Socialism, Nationalism, and the Russian Jews, 1862-1917 by Jonathan Frankel‏
Die europäische Triarchie (The European Triarchy)

Study, Freedom

“Creation is dominated by three absolutely different factors: First, nature, which works upon us by its laws; second, the artist, who creates a spiritual contact with nature and his materials; third, the medium of expression through which the artist translates his inner world. Of those three components only one, the medium, is material.”

Hans Hofmann (1880–1966) American artist

As quoted in Hans Hofmann (1963) by William Chapin Seitz, p. 15
1960s

World, Law, Nature