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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:

No; I don't see any mechanism that would make it possible. However, I'm always paraphrasing J.B.S. Haldane, "The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it's stranger than we can imagine."

Arthur C. Clarke

Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind that looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10 000 years ago.

John Maynard Keynes

A Nursery Magician took
All little children by the hand:
And led them laughing through the book
Where Alice walks in Wonderland.

Henry Savile Clarke A Selection from the Letters of Lewis Carroll to his Child-Friends (1933)

A so-called magician, more than a poet, must be born with a peculiar aptitude for the calling. He must first of all possess a mind of contrarieties, quick to grasp the possibilities of seemingly producing the most opposite effects from the most natural causes.

Alexander Herrmann

[I]t is doubtful whether we may name any weak thing as typically spiritual.

Alice Meynell John Ruskin (1900)

All day I think about it, then at night I say it. Where did I come from, and what am I supposed to be doing? I have no idea. My soul is from elsewhere, I'm sure of that, and I intend to end up there.

Coleman Barks The Essential Rumi (1995)

I don't want realism. I want magic! Yes, yes, magic. I try to give that to people. I do misrepresent things. I don't tell truths. I tell what ought to be truth.

Tennessee Williams

These things we also speak, not with words taught by human wisdom, but with those taught by [the] spirit, as we combine spiritual [matters] with spiritual [words].

Paul of Tarsus

A toy which people cry for,
And on their knees apply for,
Dispute, contend and lie for,
And if allowed
Would be right proud
Eternally to die for.

Ambrose Bierce The Devil's Dictionary (1911)

Though inland far we be,
Our souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither.

William Wordsworth

I listen to the wind of my soul/Where I’ll end up, well, I think only God really knows

Cat Stevens

We're social animals, but we crave solitude to make our souls

Ursula K. Le Guin A Very Good American Novel (2013)

Lord of oneself, uncumbered with a name.

John Dryden

The Higher Self is Atma, the inseparable ray of the Universal and One Self. It is the God above, more Self is than within, us. Happy the man who succeeds in saturating his inner Ego with it!

Helena Blavatsky The Key to Theosophy (1889)

The discoveries of modern science do not disagree with the oldest traditions which claim an incredible antiquity for our race. Chapter I

Helena Blavatsky

I am restless. I am athirst for faraway things. My soul goes out in a longing to touch the skirt of the dim distance. O Great Beyond, O the keen call of thy flute! I forget, I ever forget, that I have no wings to fly, that I am bound in this spot evermore.

Rabindranath Tagore The Gardener (1915)

Crosswise to all political fronts, it is the “ego” in society that offers the most resolute resistance against the decisive enlightenment. Scarcely anyone will put up with radical self-reflection on this point, not even many of those who regard themselves as enlighteners.

Peter Sloterdijk Critique of Cynical Reason (1983)

There is a divinity within our breast.

Ovid

Books are the mirrors of the soul.

Virginia Woolf Between the Acts (1941)

I sent my Soul through the Invisible,
Some letter of that After-life to spell:
And by and by my Soul return'd to me,
And answer'd "I Myself am Heav'n and Hell."

Omar Khayyám FitzGerald, Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (1859)

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