Inspirational Quotes on Spirituality

“Joy is the daughter of calm ... The Strain is only when you are serving another master, the world, fame, the good opinion of men—or carrying two days' worth of burden on the one day. Remember that it must not be.”

“Do not be too ready to do, just be. I said, "Be, ye therefore perfect" not "do" perfect things.”

“Listen quietly. Sometimes you may get no message. Meet thus all the same. You will absorb an atmosphere. Cultivate silence. "God speaks in silences.." A silence, a soft wind. Each can be a message to convey My meaning to the heart, though by no voice, or even word.”

“You will have the consciousness of My Presence when you hear no voice. Abide in that Presence. "I am the light of the world," but sometimes in tender pity, I withhold too glaring a light, lest, in its dazzling brightness, you should miss your daily path and work.”

“I am the Lord of little things, the Divine Control of little happenings. Nothing in the day is too small to be a part of My scheme. The little stones in a mosaic play a big part.”

“God chargeth me to believe His daylight at midnight.”

“Mind what you are about: labor faithfully in My vineyard: I will be your reward. Write, read, sing, lament, keep silence, pray, bear your crosses manfully: eternal life is worth all these, and greater combats....It is no small matter to lose or gain the kingdom of God. Lift up, therefore, thy face to Heaven; behold I and all My Saints with Me, who in this world have had a great conflict, now rejoice, are comforted now, are now secure, are now at rest; and they shall for all eternity abide with Me in the kingdom of My Father.”

“فكل من هؤلاء الفلاسفة يعبر عن الوجودية بصورة مختلفة لكنهم كلهم متفقون على إن الفكر المجرد يقود إلى شيء فظيع في مختلف المجالات. بما في ذلك مجال المعرفة. ففي رأي هؤلاء المفكرين أن المعرفة التي نصل إليها بفكرنا هي النظريات والقوانين الرياضية التي تجعل الإنسان مجرد اّلة. لكنهم يأملون أن يصلوا إلي نوع من الاختبار الصوفي العلوي الغامض الذي يختلف عن الفكر المجرد ويؤدي إلي الكليات.”

“It is even possible to be a martyr for the Faith and yet not love Jesus Christ.”

“...another symbol from physical nature will express sufficiently well the real place of mysticism before mankind. The one created thing which we cannot look at is the one thing in the light of which we look at everything. Like the sun at noonday, mysticism explains everything else by the blaze of its own victorious invisibility. Detached intellectualism is (in the exact sense of a popular phrase) all moonshine; for it is light without heat, and it is secondary light, reflected from a dead world. But the Greeks were right when they made Apollo the god both of imagination and of sanity; for he was both the patron of poetry and the patron of healing. Of necessary dogmas and a special creed I shall speak later. But that transcendentalism by which all men live has primarily much the position of the sun in the sky. We are conscious of it as of a kind of splendid confusion; it is something both shining and shapeless, at once a blaze and a blur. But the circle of the moon is as clear and unmistakable, as recurrent and inevitable, as the circle of Euclid on a blackboard. For the moon is utterly reasonable; and the moon is the mother of lunatics and has given to them all her name.”

“Can you step back from your mind and thus understand all things?”

“If there is a religious agency in our lives, it has to appear in the manner of our times. Not from on high, but a revelation that hides itself in our culture, it will be ground-level, on the street, it'll be coming down the avenue in the traffic, hard to tell apart from anything else.”

“Blessed and fortunate creature, your eyes shall behold Him and not another's. All that you are, sins apart, is destined, if you will let God have His good way, to utter satisfaction. The Brocken spectre 'looked to every man like his first love', because she was a cheat. But God will look to every soul like its first love because He is its first love. Your place in heaven will seem to be made for you and you alone, because you were made for it--made for it stitch by stitch as a glove is made for a hand”

“God is easy to please but hard to satisfy.”

“It has every available quality except that of being useful.”

“Perhaps God was moved by the tears of someone praying for me, perhaps the entreaties of my late mother, perhaps a heavenly spirit who came to my rescue—I don’t know, but the devil was defeated.”

“People may ridicule the vows of obedience, fasting, and prayer, yet these are the only way to attain true freedom. It is by discarding cumbersome and unnecessary demands, by subduing and disciplining selfish and conceited aspirations, by obedience, that the monk, with God’s help, achieves spiritual freedom and thereby finds spiritual happiness.”

“There's just one thing: how can I make a compact with the earth evermore? I don't kiss the earth, I don't tear open her bosom; what should I do, become a peasant or a shepherd? I keep going and I don't know; have I gotten into stench and shame, or into light and joy? That's the whole trouble, because everything on earth is a riddle.”

“I have a religion, my own religion, and I even have more religion than all of them, with their mummery and hocus-pocus. I adore God! I believe in the Supreme Being, in a Creator, whatever He is, it doesn't matter to me, who has placed us here below to fulfill our duties as citizens and as fathers; but I don't need to go to church to kiss silver plates and empty my pocket to fatten a lot of humbugs who are better fed than we are! For one can honor Him just as well in the woods, in a field, or even by contemplating the vault of the heavens, as the ancients did. My personal God is the God of Socrates, of Franklin, Voltaire, and Béranger. I'm for the Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar and the immoral principles of '89! So I don't admit any old codger of a God who walks in his garden with a cane in his hand, lodges his friends in the bellies of whales, dies with a groan and comes to life at the end of three days: absurdities in themselves and, furthermore, completely opposed to all physical laws; which proves, by the way, that the priests have always beens sunk in a mire of ignorance in which they force the populace to wallow with them.”

“It is a secret, necessary and important for me alone, and inexpressible in words.”