Quotes on Spirituality

To be identified with your mind is to be trapped in time: the compulsion to live almost exclusively through memory and anticipation. This creates an endless preoccupation with past and future and an unwillingness to honor and acknowledge the present moment and allow it to be. The compulsion arises because the past gives you an identity and the future holds the promise of salvation, of fulfillment in whatever form. Both are illusions.

There are few people so stubborn in their atheism who, when danger is pressing in, will not acknowledge the divine power.

I was able to see faith as more than just a comfort to the weary or a hedge against death; rather, it was an active, palpable agent in the world.

What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we cannot cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves?

The ultimate lesson all of us have to learn is unconditional love, which includes not only others but ourselves as well.

That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.

Man cannot live without joy; therefore when he is deprived of true spiritual joys it is necessary that he become addicted to carnal pleasures.

In the assemblies of the enlightened ones there have been many cases of mastering the Way bringing forth the heart of plants and trees; this is what awakening the mind for enlightenment is like. The fifth patriarch of Zen was once a pine-planting wayfarer; Rinzai worked on planting cedars and pines on Mount Obaku. . . . Working with plants, trees, fences and walls, if they practice sincerely they will attain enlightenment.

In two areas above all others the Christian demonstration of love and communication stands clear: in the area of the Christian couple and their children; and in the personal relationships of Christians in the church. If there is no demonstration in these two places, on the personal level, the world can conclude that orthodox Christian doctrine is nothing but dead, cold words.

Nothing can so pierce the soul as the uttermost sigh of the body.

Earth's crammed with heaven, And every common bush afire with God: But only he who sees takes off his shoes.

Man has always sacrificed truth to his vanity, comfort and advantage. He lives not by truth but by make-believe.

It is only in marriage with the world that our ideals can bear fruit; divorced from it, they remain barren.

The mystery of a person, indeed, is ever divine to him that has a sense for the godlike.

The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.

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.

What lies behind you and what lies in front of you, pales in comparison to what lies inside of you.

Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.

But I always think that the best way to know God is to love many things.

The spirit is the true self, not that physical figure which can be pointed out by your finger.

For those struggling in midstream, in great fear of the flood, of growing old and of dying for all those I say, an island exists where there is no place for impediments, no place for clinging: the island of no going beyond. I call it nirvana, the complete destruction of old age and dying.