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Spirituality Quotes

Alice Bailey, Marianne Williamson, Helena Blavatsky and Eckhart Tolle account for most of the top entries, so the page leans toward modern and esoteric writing. The best-sourced pieces are less solemn. Woody Allen says he does not want to achieve immortality through his work but through not dying, and Henry Miller, in Sexus (1949), counts sex among the nine reasons for reincarnation.

Two flags. “Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology” is credited to Larry Niven and marked misattributed. “Corporations have neither bodies to kick nor souls to damn” is credited to Andrew Jackson and disputed, which says more about how the topic tag was applied than about spirituality.

Random quote on Spirituality

Most quoted on spirituality:

Psychologically speaking, enlightenment always meant an advance in the training of mistrust — in the construction of an ego concerned about self-assertion and control of reality.

Peter Sloterdijk Critique of Cynical Reason (1983)

In the middle of one of the biggest, longest, noisiest, dirtiest thoroughfares in the world lives the reincarnation of a drowned princess, or rather, two hundred reincarnations of a drowned princess.

Douglas Adams

You have evolved from worm to man, but much within you is still worm. Once you were apes, yet even now man is more of an ape than any of the apes."

Friedrich Nietzsche

Taken on the whole, I would believe that Gandhi's views were the most enlightened of all the political men in our time. We should strive to do things in his spirit... not to use violence in fighting for our cause, but by non-participation in what we believe is evil.

Albert Einstein

Only the feeble resign themselves to final death and substitute some other desire for the longing for personal immortality. In the strong the zeal for perpetuity overrides the doubt of realizing it, and their superabundance of life overflows upon the other side of death.

Miguel de Unamuno

The soul is placed in the body like a rough diamond; and must be polished, or the lustre of it will never appear. And ’tis manifest, that as the rational soul distinguishes us from brutes; so education carries on the distinction, and makes some less brutish than others.

Daniel Defoe The Education of Women (1719)

I would be disappointed if everything I saw turned out to be something Western Electric will build once Bell Labs works the bugs out. There ought to be some magic, somewhere, just for flavor.

Robert A. Heinlein Glory Road (1963)

'Tis immortality, 'tis that alone,
Amid life's pains, abasements, emptiness,
The soul can comfort, elevate, and fill.
That only, and that amply this performs.

Edward Young

Soul is the Man: for who will so
The body name?
And to that power all grace we owe
That decks our living frame.

Thomas Campion

The soul comes from without into the human body, as into a temporary abode, and it goes out of it anew... it passes into other habitations, for the soul is immortal.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Each soul enters the world strengthened by the victories or weakened by the defects of its past lives. Its place in this world is determined by past virtues and shortcomings.

Origen

Children live on one side of despair, the awakened on the other side. p.83

Hermann Hesse Journey to the East (1932)

Love works magic.
It is the final purpose
Of the world story,
The Amen of the universe.

Novalis Blüthenstaub (1798)

I don't want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying. I don't want to live on in the hearts of my countrymen; I want to live on in my apartment.

Woody Allen The Illustrated Woody Allen Reader (1993)

See the person's eating and cooking, and then you can judge his or her spirituality.

Michio Kushi Spiritual Journey: Michio Kushi's Guide to Endless Self-Realization and Freedom (1994)

All of magic essentially involves sneaking something you want past reality while it’s distracted and looking the other way.

Naomi Novik Scholomance fantasy series (2020)

Science is a way of talking about the universe in words that bind it to a common reality. Magic is a method of talking to the universe in words that it cannot ignore. The two are rarely compatible.

Neil Gaiman

* * * But while
I breathe Heaven's air, and Heaven looks down on me,
And smiles at my best meanings, I remain
Mistress of mine own self and mine own soul.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

MAGIC, n. An art of converting superstition into coin. There are other arts serving the same high purpose, but the discreet lexicographer does not name them.

Ambrose Bierce The Devil's Dictionary (1911)

There is magic within
There is magic without
Follow me and you'll learn
Just what life's all about.

Kate Bush

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