Logic is about looking at the grooves. Spirituality is about hearing the music.
GLEB TSIPURSKY, “Is Spirituality Irrational”, Patheos, July 11, 2017
If spirituality is like a swimming pool, then getting wet is required. Not everyone has to jump in the deep-end. We first start by sticking our toe in, then our foot, then we run back, then next time we are up to our knees.
DANIEL CHRISTIAN, “The Journey: Spiritual not religious”, Ukiah Daily Journal, July 27, 2017
You can read books without ever stepping into a library; and practice spirituality without ever going to a temple.
ANTHONY DE MELLO, One Minute Wisdom
Tags: Anthony de Mello
The contemplation of celestial things will make a man both speak and think more sublimely and magnificently when he descends to human affairs.
CICERO, attributed, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers
Tags: Cicero
Spirituality is much wider than any particular religion, and in the larger ideas of it that are now coming on us even the greatest religion becomes no more than a broad sect or branch of the one universal religion, by which we shall understand in the future man’s seeking for the eternal, the divine, the greater self, the source of unity and his attempt to arrive at some equation, some increasing approximation of the values of human life with the eternal and the divine values.
SRI AUROBINDO, The Renaissance in India
Tags: Sri Aurobindo
Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, journal entry, July 21, 1836
Tags: Ralph Waldo Emerson
God generally gives spiritual blessings and deliverances as He does temporal.
ROBERT SOUTH, “Watchfulness and Prayer, a Security from Temptation”, Sermons Preached Upon Several Occasions
Spirituality is a broad concept, transcending religious boundaries. By virtue of being human, all people are spiritual, regardless of whether or how they participate in religious observance.
MARGARET A. BURKHARDT, Spirituality: Living Our Connectedness
Tags: Margaret A. Burkhardt
Spirituality practiced in the state of activity is incomparably superior to that practiced in a state of withdrawal.
ANTHONY DE MELLO, One Minute Wisdom
Spirituality is a brave search for the truth about existence, fearlessly peering into the mysterious nature of life.
ELIZABETH LESSER, The New American Spirituality
On the spiritual path, all the dreck and misery is transformed, maybe not that same day, but still transformed into spiritual fuel or insight.
ANNE LAMOTT, interview, beliefnet
For me, spirituality includes the belief in things larger than ourselves, an appreciation of nature and beauty, a sensitivity to the world, a feeling of shared connection with other living things, a desire to help people less fortunate than ourselves. All of these things can occur with or without God. I do not believe in the existence of God, but I consider myself a spiritual person in the manner I have just described. I call myself a spiritual atheist. I would imagine that many people are spiritual atheists.
ALAN LIGHTMAN, “Six Questions”, Harper’s Magazine, March 19, 2014
Tags: Alan Lightman
Spirituality without morality is rootless.
HENRY WARD BEECHER, Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Tags: Henry Ward Beecher
If a man is to live, he must be all alive, body, soul, mind, heart, spirit.
THOMAS MERTON, Thoughts in Solitude
Tags: Thomas Merton
Spirituality is a henna tattoo
That you wash off when you find something new to get into
Standing in the field with your flashlight blinking
MEREDITH BROOKS, “Cosmic Woo Woo”
What is common to all paths that are spiritual is, of course, the Spirit-breath, life energy, that is why all true paths are essentially one path, because there is only one Spirit, one breath, one life, one energy in the universe. It belongs to none of us and all of us. We all share it. Spiritually does not make us otherworldly; it renders us more fully alive.
MATTHEW FOX, Creation Spirituality
Tags: Matthew Fox
There are in every man, always, two simultaneous allegiances, one to God, the other to Satan. Invocation of God, or Spirituality, is a desire to climb higher; that of Satan, or animality, is delight in descent.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE, My Heart Laid Bare
Tags: Charles Baudelaire
It is in our wild nature that we best recover from our un-nature, our spirituality.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, Twilight of the Idols
Tags: Friedrich Nietzsche
Spirituality is fearlessness. It is a way of looking boldly at this life we have been given, here, now, on earth, as this human being.
ELIZABETH LESSER, The New American Spirituality
Tags: Elizabeth Lesser
Nothing is more repulsive than a furtively prurient spirituality; it is just as unsavory as gross sensuality.
CARL JUNG, Marriage as a Psychological Relationship
Tags: Carl Jung
If the spiritual values of human existence at its highest term of development and achievement do not endure, amidst all the changes and chances of this mortal universe, there seems to be no stable or coherent meaning in existence. Then the universe is irrational–indeed it is no universe at all.
JOSEPH ALEXANDER LEIGHTON, Man and the Cosmos: An Introduction to Metaphysics
Tags: Joseph Alexander Leighton
When you approach spirituality as an adventure of being alive, you start as you would any adventure–with a sense of mystery and not-knowing. Instead of searching for answers that make you feel safe, you set out into the vastness of life and death, with a willingness to continually grow. You open up to the possibility that your ordinary life is an extraordinary adventure, and that your joys and sorrows have meaning. Spiritual practice becomes your rudder, offering direction and insight and discretion as you venture into the unknown.
ELIZABETH LESSER, The Seeker’s Guide: Making Your Life a Spiritual Adventure
Spirituality manifests in countless outer forms … underneath these outward forms, there is a common longing for the sacred, a universal desire to touch and celebrate the mystery of life. It is in the depths of the soul that one discovers the essential and universal dimensions of spirituality.
DAVID N. ELKINS, Beyond Religion
Spirituality is a simple welcoming and blissful attitude towards life, yourself and others. It is an innate intelligence that keeps you aware and sharp as you perform your daily activities. Spirituality is no dogma or philosophy to be forced on you in order to transform you. Spirituality is the science that has created experiential techniques that give you the power and ability to go back to your natural you, the you who retains all your latent intelligence, potential and possibilities, as well as the experience of the truth of Existence.
NITHYANANDA, Life Bliss Magazine, August 2009
Spirituality is the place where we meet primordial reality and wrestle with the forces of primordial experience that date back to the very origins of our human lives. It is a space for self-knowledge and self-transcendence and the processes they set in train. It is the space where we encounter the forces of shadow and repression and interpret or misinterpret them, contain them safely as we respond to the upward call of the divine and the awe-inspiring wonder of God, or give way to the darker powers of disorder and destruction.
J. FINNEGAN, The Audacity of Spirit: The Meaning and Shaping of Spirituality Today
We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.
TEILHARD DE CHARDIN, attributed, The Joy of Kindness
But Christ, that came into the world not to imitate, but to correct and transcend both that of the Jews and of the philosophers, sequesters his doctrine from the empty formality of names, reducing it to its inward vigour and spirituality.
ROBERT SOUTH, “Sermon LIII”, Sermons Preached Upon Several Occasions
The first peace, which is the most important, is that which comes within the souls of people when they realize their relationship, their oneness with the universe and all its powers, and when they realize at the center of the universe dwells the Great Spirit, and that its center is really everywhere, it is within each of us.
BLACK ELK, attributed, Earth Wisdom
The seas are not still while the winds blow; neither can a man be spiritually alive while his affections are upon the earth.
WILLIAM SCOTT DOWNEY, Proverbs
Tags: William Scott Downey
Spirituality is a movement away from suffering and toward a way of life that liberates us from the self-defeating patterns of the conventional social ego. To further this movement, we need a new understanding of ourselves and practices to transform that understanding from a momentary flash of insight to deeply engrained habits.
ROGER S. GOTTLIEB, Spirituality: What It Is and Why It Matters
Spirituality is a clarion call to change in this respect. But the change called for is not one of fitting everything into a fixed framework. It is a change from what is, to what might well be–a change from the real to the ideal. Spirituality is a continual endeavour to bring out the best potential latent in every person or society.
SWAMI AGNIVESH, Applied Spirituality
There is no spiritual life without growth in grace.
EDWARD MEYRICK GOULBURN, Thoughts on Personal Religion: Being a Treatise on the Christian Life in Its Two Chief Elements, Devotion and Practice
Spirituality is universal. It is available to every human being … It is a human phenomenon. This does not mean that it has no divine component, but it does mean that spirituality is an inborn, natural potential of the human being.
DAVID N. ELKINS, Beyond Religion
A physical man does not receive the things of the spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; and he cannot get to know [them], because they are examined spiritually. However, the spiritual man examines indeed all things, but he himself is not examined by any man.
Spirituality is a space where lovers meet and in the meeting God is found.
J. FINNEGAN, The Audacity of Spirit: The Meaning and Shaping of Spirituality Today
Spirituality is a process by which individuals recognize the importance of orienting their lives to something nonmaterial that is beyond or larger than themselves … so that there is an acknowledgement of and at least some dependence upon a higher power, or Spirit.
J. E. MARTIN & C. R. CARLSON, Spiritual Dimensions of Health Psychology
The spiritual life does not remove us from the world but leads us deeper into it.
HENRI J. M. NOUWEN, attributed, Spirituality: Passages in Search of the Heart of God
God is the eternal Giver. The spiritual task is to become the conduit for the generosity of God.
SWAMI AGNIVESH, Applied Spirituality
Take courage, in the name of Jesus Christ, and once again assault the great task of spirituality of mind. Was any solid and grand attainment ever yet made without repeated failures? Did ever anyone climb to the pinnacle of human ambition without repeated checks, and hindrances, and disappointments, and manifold changes of worldly tactics? And is it to be imagined that a man can climb the Jacob’s ladder of sanctity, whereupon angels are continually passing one another on Divine errands, adding “to his faith virtue, and to virtue knowledge, and to knowledge temperance, and to temperance patience, and to patience godliness, and to godliness brotherly kindness, and to brotherly kindness charity,” without a resolute energy of will, and a buoyance of spirit which is determined to succeed?
EDWARD MEYRICK GOULBURN, Thoughts on Personal Religion: Being a Treatise on the Christian Life in Its Two Chief Elements, Devotion and Practice
My vision is to create a new age man, one who realizes that he is pure bliss; who lives with sound spiritual strength in the material world; who embraces anything with totality; who is total not just perfect; who understands that this universe is a wonderful chaos with an amazing order; who strives to move in tune with it and becomes a mere witness in the event. He will live like a Paramahamsa — an enlightened one! His life itself will be meditative, deeply rooted in the universal consciousness, moving in synchronicity with the power of coincidence, serving himself and others, and producing results seamlessly.
NITHYANANDA, Life Bliss Magazine, August 2009
Spiritual high water mark is seldom if ever attained except by a gradual rise in the tide of principle.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE, attributed, Day’s Collacon
Tags: Christian Nestell Bovee
Every culture has recognized a life force that moves through all creation. The soul comes alive when it is nurtured by this sacred energy, and one’s existence becomes infused with passion, power, and depth.
DAVID N. ELKINS, Beyond Religion
Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality.
CARL SAGAN, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
Tags: Carl Sagan
I don’t understand why people insist on pitting concepts of evolution and creation against each other. Why can’t they see that spiritualism and science are one? That bodies evolve and souls evolve and the universe is a fluid package that marries them both in a wonderful package called a human being. What’s wrong with that idea?
GARTH STEIN, The Art of Racing in the Rain
Spirituality is a consciousness of God’s presence within us. A consciousness that God is right here. Now.
GLORIA WADE-GAYLES, My Soul Is a Witness
Spirituality refers to a way of being in the world that acknowledges the existence of, and the desire to be in relationship with, a transcendent dimension or higher power. This spiritual tendency is believed to move the individual toward knowledge, hope, love, transcendence, connectedness, and compassion.
M. T. BURKE & J. MIRANTI, The Spiritual and Religious Dimensions of Counseling
Spirituality is a healing force in which there are no rules attached to God’s love and God’s ability to sustain us.
SUKHRAJ S. DHILLON, Science, Religion & Spirituality
Searching outside of you is Samsara (the world). Searching within you leads to Nirvana.
AMIT RAY, Yoga and Vipassana: An Integrated Life Style
There is such a fixed antipathy in nature against the spirituality of the ways of God, that unless it be wrought out by the Spirit’s giving us “a new heart to perceive, and eyes to see,” there is no possibility of ever reconciling these together.
ROBERT SOUTH, “Sermon LIII”, Sermons Preached Upon Several Occasions
Your life is your spiritual path. It’s what’s right in front of you. You can’t live anyone else’s life. The task is to live yours and stop trying to copy one you think looks better.
SANDY NATHAN, Stepping Off the Edge: Learning & Living Spiritual Practice
How abundantly do spiritual beings display the powers that belong to them!
CONFUCIUS, attributed, Day’s Collacon
Tags: Confucius
Spirituality which comes from the Latin spiritus, meaning “breath of life” is a way of being and experiencing that comes through awareness of a transcendental dimension and that is characterized by certain identifiable values in regard to self, others, nature, life and whatever one considers to be the Ultimate.
DAVID N. ELKINS, Beyond Religion
Spirituality is a living faith that is nurtured and expressed by certain practices that together make up a spiritual path.
BRADLEY HANSON, A Graceful Life
It was impossible for the human mind to suspect that it was itself the sole creator of the divine world. It found the divine world before it; it found it as history, as tradition, as a sentiment, as a habit of thought; and it necessarily made it the object of its loftiest speculations. Thus was born metaphysics, and thus were developed and perfected the divine ideas, the basis of Spiritualism.
MIKHAIL BAKUNIN, God and the State
Tags: Mikhail Bakunin
Spirituality is paying attention, and being intentional on issues of being, not just doing.
ELAINE K. OLSON, “Does how you pray matter?”, Quad City Times, July 28, 2017
Spirituality is not a theoretic kind of thing. It is interwoven into life, itself. You have to live to understand it. You have to practice it.
CHRONIXX, “Chronixx Shares His Chronology”, relix, July 14, 2017
Spiritual quest is the new Lamborghini. It’s not the new iPhone, swanky car, designer gowns that are being flaunted — spiritual glamour is the latest aspiration for the millennial. The next time you enter the velvet rope, be sure to brush up your knowledge on the world of spirituality, and carry the aura of positivity. It’s ‘in’.
NONA WALIAL, “In vogue: Spiritual glamour”, Times of India, July 9, 2017
When I asked the seeress why she thinks spirituality is experiencing such a boom, she gave a surprising answer: Because it’s pretty.
EMILY SHUGERMAN, “If Urban Outfitters Did Mystic Healing”, The Independent, July 18, 2017
Spirituality is not rituals, it’s the way one lives life. It’s communicating, it’s word of honor, it’s always seeing the good in everyone, it’s the courage to do what’s right, it’s taking care of one’s health. It’s feeling.
REGINA LOPEZ, “Internal growth and political life”, Manila Times, July 19, 2017
Pop-spirituality is a trend created by market forces … but pop-spiritualists mistakenly believe that an individual, if he is truly individual, cannot mislead himself. But there is a difference between honest and dishonest spirituality, between real and imagined revelation. Because pop-spirituality is fashionable and followers of fashion must follow, pop-spirituality cannot create a mature leadership; it cannot enlighten our lone moment of death.
THOMAS M. EASLEY, “Talk of pop spirituality”, The Economic Times, August 5, 2017
To me, honestly, so much of spirituality is tied in with art and being able to exist and deal with all the hardship that’s just a normal part of life.
EMILY HOURICAN, “Art is what makes it possible to be alive”, The Independent, August 5, 2017
Bottom of Form
Spirituality is understanding the inherent limitations of the material world. When that becomes clear to us, we can live in a manner that allows us to experience the infinite peace that is our true nature.
RITA DEMONTIS, “Hugging saint embraces Torontonians”, Toronto Sun, July 9, 2017
Bottom of Form
Spirituality is deeply personal and while some practices like yoga may be performed alongside others the actual belief structures and connection is unique to the individual and often completely known only to themselves.
DAWN DEMERS, “7 Differences Between Spirituality and Religion”, beliefnet, July 23, 2017
Bottom of Form
Spirituality is not a different way of living. Spirituality is the tool, the compass, which guides me in my normal day-to-day living–whether personal, professional life, family life. That is spirituality. My power lies in the present moment.
SISTER SHIVANI, “On Chai With Manju”, India New England News, July 11, 2017
Bottom of Form
For me, my spirituality is all about my identity, being grounded in and connected to who I am as a person.
KIM TOCKER, “Scleroderma and the Ordinary Girl”, Scleroderma News, August 1, 2017
Bottom of Form
Intimacy is a core belief that deep within me lives an essence that not even a Madison Avenue marketing firm or political pollster can reach. Spirituality recognizes the link between the two. The depth of spiritual expression within our religious life is the opening of our life to the beyond and a hunger from the within. Growing in our faith isn’t about making our life a little bit better. It is the audacious belief that God can make us anew!
DANIEL CHRISTIAN, “The Journey: Spiritual not religious”, Ukiah Daily Journal, July 27, 2017
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You know, spirituality is difficult to pin down by geography, and it is also incredibly private and personal. What I have discovered in more than three decades of study is there are local intuitives and empaths who are deeply trusted by their neighbors, but many folks are simply more comfortable speaking to a complete stranger.
CORY DAVENPORT, “Open your third eyes, chakras and the rest of your minds: Psychic fair coming to Mineral Springs Mall”, RiverBender, July 14, 2017Bottom of Form
The spiritual vision may be lost by non-use, as any other faculty may be lost.
LYMAN ABBOTT, Seeking After God