Spiritual Quotes

The Holy Lies Between

The holy lies between and underneath your thoughts,
along the creek-beds where the spirit-heron stalks
the sunlight in the stream, the scattered sparks of dream—

The holy wanders free, a wild unfettered wind
refusing to be held in idols of the mind—
Beyond ideas, where your words are only air

that casts no shadow in the heron’s lightning eye,
and silence overcomes all creeds with mystery,
where all horizons fade, in heron’s haunted glade:
the holy there is seen—beyond and in between.

—SD

Li Po Considers the Moon in the Shape of an Olive

I pop some pills. And there, I’ve forgotten all of it.
And all of what follows.

--Brian Kim Stefans

There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness."


-Dalai Lama

I've got no one to blame but you. You've got no one to blame but me. I say we are both right.

Originally posted by gentlegil
There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness."


-Dalai Lama

Not to me, but to the Logos hearkening, it is wise to acknowledge that all are one.

—Heraclitus (Fragment 50)

"Always look on the bright side of life !"

Monty P.

At the same time it is less and less plausible to conceive God in the thought-graven image of a transcendental monarch modeled on the Pharaohs and Cyruses... The God of mystical experience may not be the ethically obstreperous and precisely defined autocrat beloved of religious authoritarians; but as an experience, not concept, as vividly real as indefinable, this God does not violate the intellectual conscience, the aesthetic imagination, or religious intuition. A Christianity which is not basically mystical must become either a political ideology or a mindless fundamentalism. This is, indeed, already happening, and it is curious to note that, for lack of the mystical element, both trends fall back on the Bible as their basic inspiration—and it has always struck me that Biblical idolatry is one of the most depressing and sterile fixations of the religious mind.

—Alan Watts, in Behold the Spirit, 1947.

"Do not be excessively righteous and do not be overly wise. Why should you ruin yourself?"

Ecclesiastes 7:16

"Be not decieved. God is not mocked. For whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap."
--Galatians 6:7

"If men get into a fight with one another, and the wife of one intervenes to rescue her husband from the grip of his opponent by reaching out and seizing his genitals, you shall cut off her hand; show no pity."

Deuteronomy 25:11,12

The light of the Infinite One is without form and only takes shape—for good or bad—in the recipient. Therefore it is up to us. We have to do our best to shape God’s light into blessing, not curse.

—Rebbe Nachman of Bratslav

Achilles: You certainly are exuberant today.

Tortoise: I have good reason to be. My aunt, who is a fortune-teller, told me that a stroke of Good Fortune would befall me today. So I am tingling with anticipation.

Achilles: Don’t tell me you believe in fortune-telling!

Tortoise: No. . . but they say it works even if you don’t believe in it.

Achilles: Well, that’s fortunate indeed.



—Douglas R. Hodstadter, from “Little Harmonic Labyrinth,” in Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

We ought not to be weary of doing little things for the love of God,
who regards not the greatness of the work, but the love with which it is performed.

Brother Lawence
"Practicing the presence of God"

Originally posted by ivanhoe


"Let your religion be less of a theory and more of a love affair."

Gilbert K. Chesterton