Skip to content

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:

Intimations of Immortality
The soul that rises with us, our life's star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar.

William Wordsworth

I long to believe in immortality. I shall never be able to bid you an entire farewell. If I am destined to be happy with you here — how short is the longest life. I wish to believe in immortality — I wish to live with you forever.

John Keats

Of such as he was, there be few on earth;
Of such as he is, there are few in Heaven:
And life is all the sweeter that he lived,
And all he loved more sacred for his sake:
And Death is all the brighter that he died,
And Heaven is all the happier that he's there.

Gerald Massey

The second half of the first millennium BCE was the period that created many of the ideological and institutional elements that characterize later Indian religions. The renouncer tradition played a central role during this formative period of Indian religious history.

Gavin Flood

Being aware of your breathing takes attention away from thinking and creates space. It is one way of generating consciousness. Although the fullness of consciousness is already there as the unmanifested, we are here to bring consciousness into this dimension....

Eckhart Tolle A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose (2005)

Most humans are still in the grip of the egoic mode of consciousness: identified with their mind and run by their mind. If they do not free themselves from their mind in time, they will be destroyed by it. They will experience increasing confusion, conflict, violence, illness, despair, madness. Egoic mind has become like a sinking ship. If you don't get off, you will go down with it. The collective egoic mind is the most dangerously insane and destructive entity ever to inhabit this planet.

Eckhart Tolle The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment (1997)

The Art of Peace begins with you. Work on yourself and your appointed task in the Art of Peace. Everyone has a spirit that can be refined, a body that can be trained in some manner, a suitable path to follow. You are here to realize your inner divinity and manifest your innate enlightenment. Foster peace in your own life and then apply the Art to all than you encounter.

Morihei Ueshiba Inspire! What Great Leaders Do (2004)

Antony ... used to say that it behooved a man to give all his time to his soul rather than his body, yet to grant a short space to the body through its necessities; but all the more earnestly to give up the whole remainder to the soul and seek its profit, that it might not be dragged down by the pleasures of the body, but, on the contrary, the body might be in subjection to the soul.

Athanasius of Alexandria

There is very truly a gospel in all this teaching us never to forget that though the outer side of life may seem so dull and heavy, there is yet always the Divine fire glowing within, remember that 'the soul of things is sweet, the heart of being is celestial rest, stronger than woe is Will, that which is good doth pass to better, best.'

Charles Webster Leadbeater Some Glimpses of Occultism: Ancient and Modern (1903)

If men understood the plan of evolution, instead of working each for his own personal ends they would all join together as a community and work harmoniously for the good of all with mutual tolerance and forbearance. It is obvious that if this were done all of these evils would almost immediately cease or at any rate could very shortly be removed. p. 326

Charles Webster Leadbeater Some Glimpses of Occultism: Ancient and Modern (1903)

Science, dimly perceiving the truth, may find Bacteria and other infinitesimals in the human body, and see in them but occasional and abnormal visitors to which diseases are attributed. Occultism -- which discerns a life in every atom and molecule, whether in a mineral or human body, in air, fire or water -- affirms that our whole body is built of such lives, the smallest bacteria under the microscope being to them in comparative size like an elephant to the tiniest infusoria.

Helena Blavatsky

It must be so — Plato, thou reasonest well!
Else whence this pleasing hope, this fond desire,
This longing after immortality?
Or whence this secret dread, and inward horror,
O falling into nought? Why shrinks the soul
Back on herself, and startles at destruction?
'Tis the divinity that stirs within us;
'Tis heaven itself, that points out an hereafter,
And intimates eternity to man.

Joseph Addison Cato, A Tragedy (1713)

In ‘A Course in Miracles’ there is a line: ‘The Christ in you cannot be crucified,’ What that's saying is that the truth of who you are cannot be affected by lovelessness because you were not created to be the effect of lovelessness in yourself or in others. That means if I am identifying with the attacks on me, then, by definition, I am identifying with the false self.

Marianne Williamson

The thought system that dominates our culture is laced with selfish values, and relinquishing those values is a lot easier said than done. The journey to a pure heart can be highly disorienting. For years we may have worked for power, money and prestige. Now all of a sudden we’ve learned that those are just the values of a dying world. We don’t know where to search for motivation anymore.

Marianne Williamson A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of "A Course in Miracles (1992)

She’s always so ready to believe anything that anyone tells her, so long as it’s magical.
Well, I believe in magic, too, but it’s the magic that can turn a caterpillar into a butterfly, the natural wonder and beauty of the world that’s all around me. I can’t believe in some dreamland being real.

Charles de Lint Dreams Underfoot (1993)

Indeed, if I may be allowed the anachronism, the Hindus were Spinozists more than two thousand years before the advent of Spinoza, and Darwinians many centuries before Darwin, and Evolutionists many centuries before the Doctrine of Evolution was accepted by the scientists of the present age, and before any word like ’Evolution’ existed in any language of the world.

Monier Monier-Williams

It is occult students for whom search is now being made, and not mystics; it is for clear-thinking men and women that the call has gone forth, and not for the fanatic or for the person who sees nothing but the ideal, and who is unable to work successfully with situations and things as they are, and who cannot, therefore, apply the necessary and unavoidable compromise.

Alice Bailey The Externalization of the Hierarchy (1957)

Heaven begun is the living proof that makes the heaven to come credible. Christ in you is "the hope of glory." It is the eagle eye of faith which penetrates the grave, and sees far into the tranquil things of death. He alone can believe in immortality who feels the resurrection in him already.

Frederick William Robertson

Crantor, another philosopher associated with the earliest days of Plato's Academy, conceived the human soul as formed out of the primary substance of all things, the Monad or One, and the Duad or the Two. Plutarch speaks at length of this philosopher, who like his master believed in souls being distributed in earthly bodies as an exile and punishment.

Helena Blavatsky

What is Art but the perfected expression of self in contact with the world; and whether that self be of enlightening, or of fairy-telling temperament, is of no moment whatsoever. The tossing of abuse from realist to romanticist and back is but the sword-play of two one-eyed men with their blind side turned toward each other. Shall not each attempt be judged on its own merits?

John Galsworthy Vague Thoughts On Art (1911)

Related topics