Famous Quotes & Sayings

Emanuel Swedenborg

For the spiritual sense of the Word treats everywhere of the spiritual world, that is, of the state of the church in the heavens, as well as in the earth; hence the Word is spiritual and Divine.

Emil Nolde

Pictures are spiritual beings. The soul of the painter lives within them.

Ella Maillart

The true traveller is the one urged to move about for physical, aesthetic, intellectual as well as spiritual reasons.

Edward Bach

Disease is in essence the result of conflict between Soul and Mind, and will never be eradicated except by spiritual and mental effort.

Old churches must not simply stand as monuments to the past but as spiritual grandparents that have invested in the future by passing on their life to others and releasing their offspring to form new congregations. Church planting needs to be given priority by old-line denominations.

Eckhart Tolle

You are not seeking to attain some future state. That is the fallacy of many spiritual seekers. They have an image of some state - enlightenment, or whatever they call it - they want to achieve.

Eckhart Tolle

When I'm with people, I'm a spiritual teacher. That's the function, but it's not my identity. The moment I'm alone, my deepest joy is to benobody, to relinquish the function of a teacher. It's a temporary function.

Eckhart Tolle

For most people, spiritual awakening is a gradual process. Rarely does it happen all at once. When it does, though, it is usually brought about by intense suffering.

Eckhart Tolle

That is the challenge of a spiritual teacher: not to take on board the projections of specialness people have. This is especially dangerous for spiritual teachers who only have contact with disciples or followers, who may live in an ashram.

Eckhart Tolle

For spiritual teachers, it is important not to identify with the image people inevitably have of them.

Eckhart Tolle

Humanity as a whole has already gone through unimaginable suffering, mostly self-inflicted, the culmination of which was the 20th century with its unspeakable horrors. This collective suffering has brought upon a readiness in many human beings for the evolutionary leap that is spiritual awakening.

Eckhart Tolle

The nature of spiritual awakening is frequently misunderstood. The adoption of spiritual beliefs, seeing visions of God or celestial beings, the ability to channel, to heal, to foretell the future, or other paranormal powers - all such phenomena are of value and are not to be dismissed, but none of them is in itself indicative of spiritual awakening in a person who experiences them.

Eckhart Tolle

My main life interest and purpose is to bring spiritual awakening into this world, to be a vehicle for the flowering of consciousness, to help people to live more consciously with less unnecessary suffering and self-generated unhappiness.

Eckhart Tolle

Some form of suffering often brings about a readiness. One can say it cracks open the shell of the egoic mind with which many people identify as "me." Life cracks open that shell, and once that crack is there, then we are reached more easily by spiritual teaching.

Eckhart Tolle

Spiritual awakening - is becoming awake to the aliveness of this moment.

Hermann Hesse

Everything that is thought and expressed in words is one-sided, only half the truth; it all lacks totality, completeness, unity. When the Illustrious Buddha taught about the world, he had to divide it into Samsara and Nirvana, illusion and truth, into suffering and salvation. One cannot do otherwise, there is no other method for those who teach. But the world itself, being in and around us, is never one-sided. Never is a man or a deed wholly Samsara or wholly Nirvana; never is a man wholly a saint or a sinner. This only seems so because we suffer the illusion that time is something real.

Henri Nouwen

To receive spiritual direction is to recognize that God does not solve our problems or answer all our questions, but leads us closer to the mystery of our existence where all questions cease.

Henri Nouwen

I have an increasing sense that the most important crisis of our time is spiritual and that we need places where people can grow stronger in the spirit and be able to integrate the emotional struggles in their spiritual journeys.

Henri Nouwen

Spiritual maturity is not knowing what to do with your whole life, but just knowing what to do next.

Henry Ford

The function of the machine is to liberate man from brute burdens, and release his energies to the building of his intellectual and spiritual powers for conquests in the fields of thought and higher action.

Henry James

Things are always different from what they might be.

Jodie Foster

I make movies about people in spiritual crisis because it's a way for me to spend the time, the energy, the focus and the obsession to come to terms with my own spiritual crisis.

David Suzuki

With an estimated population of nine billion people by 2050, we cannot continue to consume resources at the same rate and maintain our quality of life.

David Suzuki

The one thing I feel is very hopeful, however, is the overwhelming participation of women in the movement for change.

Charles Stanley

Whatever brings you to your knees in weakness carries the greatest potential for your personal success and spiritual victory.

Charles Spurgeon

True prayer is neither a mere mental exercise nor a vocal performance. It is a spiritual commerce with the Creator of heaven and earth.

Charles Spurgeon

I will say broadly that I have more confidence in the spiritual life of the children that I have received into this church than I have in the, spiritual condition of the adults thus received. I will even go further than that, and say that I have usually found a clearer knowledge of the gospel and a warmer love of Christ in the child-converts than in the man-converts. I will even astonish you still more by saying that I have sometimes met with a deeper spiritual experience in children of ten and twelve than I have in certain persons of fifty and sixty.

Charles Spurgeon

Who among you today is doing the most for your Master's kingdom? I will tell you. Lend me a spiritual thermometer by which I may try the heat of your heart, and I will tell you the amount of your success.

Alan Watts

The meaning and purpose of dancing is the dance. Like music also, it is fulfilled in each moment of its course. You do not play a sonata in order to reach the final chord, and if the meaning of things were simply in ends, composers would write nothing but finales.

Alan Watts

We usually don't look. We overlook.

Alan Watts

You have seen that the universe is at root a magical illusion and a fabulous game, and that there is no separate "you" to get something out of it, as if life were a bank to be robbed. The only real "you" is the one that comes and goes, manifests and withdraws itself eternally in and as every conscious being. For "you" is the universe looking at itself from billions of points of view, points that come and go so that the vision is forever new.

Alan Watts

To be alive spiritually man must have union with God and must be conscious of it. Apart from this union his religious life will be an empty drudgery, a mere imitation of true spirituality.

Alan Watts

We do not "come into" this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean "waves," the universe "peoples." Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe.