I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
Technology is not in itself opposed to spirituality and religion. But it creates a great temptation.
—Thomas Merton
Love is a sacred reserve of energy; it is like the blood of spiritual evolution.
—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
The mistake we make is to turn upon our past with angry wholesale negation.… The way of wisdom is to treat it airily, lightly, wantonly, and in a spirit of poetry; and above all to use its symbols, which are its spiritual essence, giving them a new connotation, a fresh meaning.
—John Cowper Powys
We have attempted to separate the spiritual and the erotic, thereby reducing the spiritual to a world of flattened affect, a world of the ascetic who aspires to feel nothing.
—Audre Lorde
Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.
—Martin Luther King Jr.
To be a consumer is the most primitive level of being. It is to be a mouth, an eater, a devourer of things. To discover the truth of who we are, we must discard the consumer mentality and reclaim our spiritual dignity.
—David Frawley
Spiritual awakening is frequently described as a journey to the top of a mountain. We leave our attachments and our worldliness behind and slowly make our way to the top. At the peak we have transcended all pain. The only problem with this metaphor is that we leave all the others behind.… In the process of discovering our true nature, the journey goes down, not up.… Instead of transcending the suffering of all creatures, we move toward the turbulence and doubt.… We explore the reality and unpredictability of insecurity and pain, and we try not to push it away. If it takes years, if it takes lifetimes, we will let it be as it is. At our own pace, without speed or aggression, we move down and down and down. With us move millions of others, our companions in awakening from fear. At the bottom we discover water, the healing water of compassion. Right down there in the thick of things, we discover the love that will not die.
—Pema Chödrön
Our schizophrenic patient is actually experiencing inadvertently that same beatific ocean deep which the yogi and saint are ever striving to enjoy: except that, whereas they are swimming in it, he is drowning.
—Joseph Campbell
What is religion? That which is never spoken.
—Henry David Thoreau
The spiritual life does not remove us from the world, but leads us deeper into it.
—Henri J. M. Nouwen
Fearlessness is the first requisite of spirituality. Cowards can never be moral.
—Mahatma Gandhi
Art is spirituality in drag.
—Jennifer Yane
There can be no spirituality, no sanctity, no truth without the female sex.
—Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider
Monetary donations to a spiritual cause, contributions of physical labor, involvement with a particular guru, none of these necessarily mean that we have actually committed ourselves to openness. More likely these kinds of commitments are simply ways of proving that we have joined the side of "right.
—Chögyam Trungpa