Spiritual Quotes - Page 40

• On certain continents poverty is more spiritual than material, a poverty that consists of loneliness, discouragement, and the lack of meaning in life.

  Mother Teresa

  Loneliness, Poverty, Discouragement

  Mother Teresa (2016). “No Greater Love, Commemorative Edition”, p.94, New World Library

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• Terrible as is war, it yet displays the spiritual grandeur of man daring to defy his mightiest hereditary enemy--death.

  Heinrich Heine

  War, Men, Enemy

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• The Union has become not merely a physical union of states, but rather a spiritual union in common ideals of our people. Within it is room for every variety of opinion, every possible experiment in social progress. Out of such variety comes growth, but only if we preserve and maintain our spiritual solidarity.

  Herbert Hoover

  People, Growth, Progress

  United States. President (1929-1933 : Hoover), Herbert Hoover (1974). “Herbert Hoover: Containing the Public Messages, Speeches, and Statements of the President”

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• If we desire rules to govern our spiritual development we turn back to the Sermon on the Mount.

  William Jennings Bryan

  Desire, Development, Turns

  William Jennings Bryan (1922). “In His Image: By William Jennings Bryan”

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• For twenty-seven years I was witness to the spiritual deterioration of my own father, watching day after day how everything human in him left him and how gradually he turned into a grim monument to his own self.

  Svetlana Alliluyeva

  Father, Russia, Self

  Svetlana Alliluyeva (1969). “Only One Year”

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• The genuine writer cannot ignore the fact that the family is losing its spiritual foundation.

  Isaac Bashevis Singer

  Foundation, Facts, Losing

  Isaac Bashevis Singer, Joseph C. Landis (1986). “Aspects of I.B. Singer”

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• In the utmost solitudes of nature, the existence of hell seems to me as legibly declared by a thousand spiritual utterances as that of heaven.

  John Ruskin

  Heaven, Solitude, Utterance

  John Ruskin, Louisa Caroline Tuthill (1858). “The true and the beautiful in nature, art, morals, and religion”, p.332

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• To know that these are people who for a moment, in glory, in light, were true warriors, and you had the chance to associate with them, to live with them, to share with them, words and moments of power - this is the nature of spiritual study.

  Frederick Lenz

  Buddhist, Buddhism, Warrior

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• ... a less than perfect meddling in the spiritual world can breed monsters for other people.

  Iris Murdoch

  People, Perfect, Monsters

  Iris Murdoch (2001). “The Sea, The Sea”, p.369, Penguin

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• All we are asked to bear we can bear. That is a law of the spiritual life. The only hindrance to the working of this law, as of all benign laws, is fear.

  Elizabeth Goudge

  Law, Bears, Benign

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• The spiritual is not the emotional; we may receive spiritual things emotionally, but to receive them rationally we must receive them with the mind and the will; we must act on them, we must experiment on them, we must let them permeate our consciousness.

  Margaret Benson

  Emotional, Mind, May

  Margaret Benson (1908). “The Venture of Rational Faith”

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• Poetry interprets in two ways: it interprets by expressing, with magical felicity, the physiognomy and movements of the outward world; and it interprets by expressing, with inspired conviction, the ideas and laws of the inward world of man's moral and spiritual nature. In other words, poetry is interpretative both by having natural magic in it, and by having moral profundity.

  Matthew Arnold

  Men, Law, Ideas

  Matthew Arnold (1875). “Essays in Criticism”, p.128, London : [s.n.]

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• If you deny any affinity with another person or kind of person, if you declare it to be wholly different from yourself - as men have done to women, and class has done to class, and nation has done to nation - you may hate it or deify it; but in either case you have denied its spiritual equality and its human reality. You have made it into a thing, to which the only possible relationship is a power relationship. And thus you have fatally impoverished your own reality.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Respect, Hate, Equality

  Ursula K. Le Guin, Susan Wood (1980). “The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction”, p.99, Ultramarine Publishing

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• though humility and acknowledgement of one's real failings is good, the gratuitous eating of worms not put before us by God does not nourish our souls a bit - merely in fact upsets the spiritual tummy.

  Evelyn Underhill

  Real, Humility, Upset

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• As the social self can only be developed by contact with society, so the spiritual self can only be developed by contact with the spiritual world.

  Evelyn Underhill

  Self, World, Social

  Evelyn Underhill, Christopher L. Webber (2006). “Advent with Evelyn Underhill”, p.37, Church Publishing, Inc.

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• If we ask of the saints how they achieved spiritual effectiveness, they are only able to reply that, insofar as they did it themselves, they did it by love and prayer.

  Evelyn Underhill

  Prayer, Effectiveness, Saint

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• The traditional metaphor for a spiritual investigation is that of the voyage or the journey. From this image I must dissociate myself. I do not consider myself a voyager, I have preferred to stand still.

  Susan Sontag

  Journey, Voyages, Metaphor

  Susan Sontag (1983). “A Susan Sontag reader”, Vintage

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• Many men can no more be kept straight by spiritual motives than we can live without policemen.

  Lord Acton

  Men, Motive, Policemen

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• It really takes a hero to live any kind of spiritual life without religious belief.

  Mary McCarthy

  Religious, Hero, Belief

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• No circumstances can ever make or mar the unfolding of the spiritual life. Spirituality does not depend upon the environment; it depends upon one's attitude towards life.

  Annie Besant

  Attitude, Doe, Mars

  Annie Besant (2014). “The Spiritual Life”, p.1, Quest Books

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• I believe the transsexual urge, at least as I have experienced it, to be far more than a social compulsion, but biological, imaginative, and essentially spiritual, too.

  Jan Morris

  Believe, Sexuality, Gender

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• Free thought means fearless thought. It is not deterred by legal penalties, nor by spiritual consequences. Dissent from the Bible does not alarm the true investigator, who takes truth for authority not authority for truth. The thinker who is really free, is independent; he is under no dread; he yields to no menace; he is not dismayed by law, nor custom, nor pulpits, nor society-whose opinion appals so many. He who has the manly passion of free thought, has no fear of anything, save the fear of error.

  George Holyoake

  Passion, Mean, Independent

  George Jacob Holyoake (1896). “English Secularism: A Confession of Belief”, p.18, Library of Alexandria

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• No distinction seems to be more obvious than that between spiritual and temporal matters. Yet whenever they have been made objects of Legislation, they have clashed and contended with each other, till one or the other has gained the supremacy.

  James Madison

  Religion, Matter, Supremacy

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• I spent a month in India and where I learnt an important word for me, for everything that had come before and after, and the was the word 'seva' - the work you do without wanting reward, simply for the work itself, for the spiritual, for the practice and the experience it gives you by doing that work. I began to realise it was something I was searching for all my life, that I was doing theatre not for myself but for something for a search, for a seeking for something that is behind that, to find a truth somewhere about us.

  George Ogilvie

  Practice, Giving, Important

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