Spiritual Quotes - Page 330

The materialist assumption that spiritual substances do not exist is as much an act of faith as the religious belief in the reality of angels.

Religion is not something I like to talk about publicly. One reason is the politics, but also I think spirituality is deeply personal.

A lot of people have realized that a good spiritual practice and a good meditation practice have real benefit. It’s not just something nice to do to make the universe happy.

It’s perfectly natural for me to sit down and talk about meditating and spiritual practice with my friends. But then I realize, how would it sound to a drunk cynical guy in London?

I can spend years studying and being in therapy and having a very analytic spiritual meditation practice, but without the emotional component, without the softening that comes with love and vulnerability, everything else I do is really just surface.

For as spiritual as some people think my books are, I've never really dealt with religious things.

I find the practice of yoga very spiritual and taking the time to just be and to reflect through meditation and chanting helps me to connect to a higher energy.

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.

Painting expresses the depth and insight, the spiritual quality of the artist. If art is about life, then, while the depth to which the artist has drunk from the well of life may not guarantee success, it must surely improve the quality of his/her work.

I think no matter how snarky you try to be, poetry will always find a way to make a spiritual goal out of what you're doing.

I think that I would have made a fine president. But it really came down for me to a very personal, a very intimate and a spiritual decision. I don't rule anything out for the long-term future.

I was influenced by my children's education in Quaker schools in the Philadelphia area. I experienced a spiritual awakening and became a Christian, was baptized, and joined a church.

As a young adult, I began to read widely in history, philosophy, and religion - including the Bible. I began to feel that a purely secular view of life was incomplete and that the universe was a fundamentally spiritual place.

Parents sometimes object to the amount of humor introduced into stories that are designed to teach moral or spiritual lessons. They seem to think that simple grim lecturing of children is the best way to achieve such goals.

Spiritual Love is born of sorrow. . . . For men love one another with spiritual love only when they have suffered the same sorrow together, when through long days they have ploughed the stony ground buried beneath the common yoke of a common grief. It is then that they know one another and feel one another and feel with one another in their common anguish, and so they pity one another and love one another.

All around the world, people believe that there is a great conflict between good and evil. Well, it's true that there's a conflict, but it only exists in the human mind.

So much of the knowledge in our minds is based on lies and superstitions that come from thousands of years ago. Humans create stories long before we are born, and we inherit those stories, we adopt them, and we live in those stories.

The history of the creative progress of individual artists shows that, along with their spiritual growth and the increasing complexity of their inner life, their forms of expression become more complex.

I grew up Catholic. I'm not religious now but I would say that I'm a very spiritual person and you're always in search of answers.

Its subtlest, most appealing accomplishment may be in how other characters respond to Gregorius' precipitous swerve onto the spiritual path. (...) That said, Night Train to Lisbon is a very long, ambitious book that's feverishly overwritten. (...) Think of W.G. Sebald recast for the mass market: stripped of nuance, cooked at high temperature and pounded home, clause after clause. Some of the clumsiness derives from Barbara Harshav's inelegant translation -- we're often aware of her struggle -- but she can't be blamed for the pervasive bloat.

The Holocaust most assuredly challenges any and all faith in God. Faith in humanity. Faith in nature. Faith in the future. I don't "tell" young people anything. I ask them to consider many things, particularly, their assumptions regarding their natural obligations to be loving towards all living beings. Many of my works - both literary and film - are fictional, like Codex Orféo. And that's because the genre has always allowed me to suggest things that are opinions, spiritual impulses and intuitions, not necessarily provable.

The truth is that we don't know much about the spiritual world except for what Scripture tells us, so it's unwise to think we can speak with clarity about what a divine being can or cannot do. The tools of analyzing the natural world are of no use for analyzing the supernatural world. For the latter we need rules of logic, and the supernatural beliefs of the biblical writers are quite defensible in that arena.

My notion of spirituality was different than it is now, but even if I'd been the most fundamentalist of believers, I would have assumed that God had better things to do than arbitrarily smite me with shaking palsy.

If Spirituality is that you're humble in the face of forces greater than you and you believe those forces are more inclined toward being good than being bad, then I'm a spiritual person.

The human interest, and the natural interest, and the spiritual interest of this planet need to begin to take a priority over the corporate interest, the military interest, and the materialistic interests.