Spiritual Quotes - Page 209

Art thaws even the frozen, darkened soul, opening it to lofty spiritual experience.

Human beings yield in many situations, even important and spiritual and central ones, as long as it prolongs one's well-being.

The intellectual is not defined by professional group and type of occupation. Nor are good upbringing and a good family enough in themselves to produce an intellectual. An intellectual is a person whose interest in and preoccupation with the spiritual side of life are insistent and constant and not forced by external circumstances, even flying in the face of them. An intellectual is a person whose thought is nonimitative.

Ethics are complete, profound and alive only when addressed to all living beings. Only then are we in spiritual connection with the world. Any philosophy not representing this, not based on the indefinite totality of life, is bound to disappear.

My passionate sense of social justice and social responsibility has always contrasted oddly with my pronounced lack of need for direct contact with other human beings and human communities. I am truly a 'lone traveler' and have never belonged to my country, my home, my friends, or even my immediate family, with my whole heart; in the face of all these ties, I have never lost a sense of distance and a need for solitude.

For anyone going through a divorce or any other painful challenge, the first and most important recommendation I can make is to find some kind of spiritual and emotional support.

The meaning and purpose of dancing is the dance. Like music also, it is fulfilled in each moment of its course. You do not play a sonata in order to reach the final chord, and if the meaning of things were simply in ends, composers would write nothing but finales.

I consider myself a spiritual atheist. I certainly believe there are forces bigger than ourselves, and that we should be searching, individually, for meaning in our lives. But I don't believe there's a supreme being, an intelligence that created everything.

If you desire to know where your spiritual work lies, look to your emotional pain.

The natural man must know in order to believe; The spiritual man must believe in order to know

The most intimate question we can ask, and the one that has the most spiritual power, is this: What or who am I?

What matters are not the truths other people tell us or the practices that we are able to mimic, but the spiritual discoveries we make through personal investigation.

No matter what spiritual path you've walked or what teachings you've followed, they must lead you back to no path and no teaching. A true teaching is like a blazing fire that consumes itself. The teaching must not only consume you, but consume itself as well. All must be burned to ash, and then the ash must be burned. Then, and only then, is the Ultimate realized.

When human hearts break and human hearts despair, then from the twilight of the past the great conquerors of distress and care, of disgrace and misery, of spiritual slavery and physical compulsion, look down on them and hold out their eternal hands to the despairing mortals.

And now, advice for beginning mystics. Be sober, be intelligent, be educated, rely on the tangible reality as long as you can. Remember that the act of writing is a tiny part of a bigger something. Defend the value of the spiritual experience and if somebody tells you it's an old fashioned notion, laugh loudly and serenely.

People are anxious to save up financial means for old age; they should also be anxious to prepare a spiritual means for old age.... Wisdom, maturity, tranquility do not come all of a sudden when we retire.

Man is in reality a spiritual being and only when he lives in the spirit is he truly happy.

If love and agreement are manifest in a single family, that family will advance, become illumined and spiritual.

The institution of marriage works better when there's a spiritual connection. If you're marrying just for the sake of the woman, then you may lose interest in each other very soon. When we marry in the interest of the Holy Spirit with the intention of serving God and humanity, then it gives a much larger perspective.

One must execute devotional service under the guidance of a devotee or directly under the guidance of the Supreme Personality of Godhead. It is not possible, however, to train oneself without guidance from the spiritual master.

By the grace of the spiritual master the cloud of the mercy of the Personality of Godhead is brought in, and then only, when the rains of Krishna consciousness fall, can the fire of material existence be extinguished.

A devotee should be fixed in the conclusion that, the spiritual master cannot be subject to criticism and should never be considered equal to a common man.

The goal of climbing big, dangerous mountains should be to attain some sort of spiritual and personal growth, but this won't happen if you compromise away the entire process.

I have been struggling with mental illness and emptiness throughout my life. Now I want people to understand my glorious quest for the truth. Working on paintings is a process toward my artistic creation. It is a new spiritual theme of my whole philosophy for pursuing the truth. Each painting represents a process in all of my art.

I feel like a lot of the fundamental material, I've assimilated. So now the question is: Am I going to really get into my spiritual inheritance of music and really develop my abilities?