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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:

Why was I born if it wasn't forever?

Eugène Ionesco

Fish say, they have their Stream and Pond;
But is there anything Beyond?

Rupert Brooke

Ah, Christ, that it were possible,
For one short hour to see
The souls we loved, that they might tell us
What and where they be.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson Maud; A Monodrama (1855)

Happy he whose inward ear
Angel comfortings can hear,
O'er the rabble's laughter;
And, while Hatred's fagots burn,
Glimpses through the smoke discern
Of the good hereafter.

John Greenleaf Whittier

My father was an eminent button-maker at Birmingham,… but I had a soul above buttons.

George Colman the Younger

It was also believed that snakes swallowed themselves, and this resulted in their being considered emblematic of the Supreme Creator who periodically reabsorbed His Universe back to Himself.

Manly P. Hall

No one is a solitary agent. We all have various types of guides who assist us. Most important, there is a form of God in everyone’s heart, and when you put the physical body to rest, you make closer contact with the Lord in the heart and with your higher self.

Bhakti Tirtha Swami Spiritual Warrior, Volume I: Uncovering Spiritual Truths in Psychic Phenomena (1996)

One of the most tragic things I know about human nature is that all of us tend to put off living. We are all dreaming of some magical rose garden over the horizon instead of enjoying the roses that are blooming outside our windows today.

Dale Carnegie How To Stop Worrying and Start Living (1948)

"You," your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.

Francis Crick The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul (1994)

The soul is a fire that darts its rays through all the senses; it is in this fire that existence consists; all the observations and all the efforts of philosophers ought to turn towards this ME, the centre and moving power of our sentiments and our ideas.

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël

Let love embrace the ten thousand things; Heaven and earth are a single body."
With sayings such as these, Hui Shih tried to introduce a more magnanimous view of the world and to enlighten the rhetoricians.

Zhuangzi

I have but one passion: to enlighten those who have been kept in the dark, in the name of humanity which has suffered so much and is entitled to happiness. My fiery protest is simply the cry of my very soul.

Émile Zola

Reincarnation is one of the most extraordinary and potentially significant religious concepts. I am confident that there truly is such a thing as living again, that the living spring from the dead, and that the souls of the dead are in existence.

Socrates

Atma, the “Higher Self,” is neither your Spirit nor mine, but like sunlight shines on all. It is the universally diffused “divine principle,” and is inseparable from its one and absolute Meta-Spirit, as the sunbeam is inseparable from sunlight.

Helena Blavatsky The Key to Theosophy (1889)

Every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the others, that its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort. And, sadder still, there always is a chorus of willing intellectuals to say calming words about benign or altruistic empires, as if one shouldn't trust the evidence of one's eyes watching the destruction and the misery and death brought by the latest mission civilizatrice.

Edward Said Orientalism (1978)

If you send men to the penitentiary for speaking their thoughts, for endeavoring to enlighten their fellows, then the penitentiary will become a place of honor, and the victim will step from it — not stained, not disgraced, but clad in robes of glory.

Robert G. Ingersoll The trial of Charles B. Reynolds for blasphemy (1887)

Tragedy enlightens — and it must, in that it points the heroic finger at the enemy of man's freedom. The thrust for freedom is the quality in tragedy which exalts. The revolutionary questioning of the stable environment is what terrifies.

Arthur Miller Tragedy and the Common Man (1949)

No one regards the magician today as other than an ordinary man gifted with no extraordinary powers. The spectators come, not to be impressed with awe, but fully aware that his causes and effects are natural.

Alexander Herrmann The Art of Magic (1891)

Earthly providence is a travesty of justice on any other theory than that it is a preliminary stage, which is to be followed by rectifications. Either there must be a future, or consummate injustice sits upon the throne of the universe. This is the verdict of humanity in all the ages.

Randolph Sinks Foster Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895)

Laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times.

Thomas Jefferson

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