Famous Quotes & Sayings

Alice Walker

The animals of the planet are in desperate peril... Without free animal life I believe we will lose the spiritual equivalent of oxygen.

... it is a lonely programme. The very virtues you cultivate become walls that inevitably separate you from your kind.... A new danger comes to your soul, and intolerance and impatience with those who are as you have been all but destroy that which you have taken such pains to build up. Not alone are there spiritual barriers between you and the friends that you have, but your business training has made your mind incisive. In the swift rush of business you have no time for small debates and petty dilemmas.

Poverty is relative, and the lack of food and of the necessities of life is not necessarily a hardship. Spiritual and social ostracism, the invasion of your privacy, are what constitute the pain of poverty

Anne Michaels

...when we say we're looking for a spiritual adviser, we're really looking for someone to tell us what to do with our bodies. Decisions of the flesh. We forget to learn from pleasure as well as pain.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh

I would like to achieve a state of inner spiritual grace from which I could function and give as I was meant to in the eye of God.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Prison life taught him how little one can get along with, and what extraordinary spiritual freedom and peace such simplification can bring. I remember again, ironically, that today more of us in the world have the luxury of choice between simplicity and complication of life. And for the most part, we, who could choose simplicity, choose complication. War, prison, survival periods, enforce a form of simplicity on us. The monk and the nun choose it of their own free will. But if one accidentally finds it, as I have for a few days, one finds also the serenity it brings.

Anne Lamott

Drugs took me to places; they were like portals. It's kind of a cliché, but they were like portals to altered states of consciousness into ways of imagining the world, or seeing a world beyond this world, or seeing a world beyond this world that I might not have gotten to unless I discovered meditation and a very deep, intense spiritual path based on contemplation and meditation.

Anne Lamott

If you're lucky you find your way into a spiritual community and you start to find the great teachers of all the ages who said the same thing. There's only love, you're made of love.

Anne Lamott

I do not understand how deeply people seem to like my work - but I love that people feel I have helped them through hardships, and also have shared my experience of living a more spiritual and present life. It's so great to be able to make people laugh, because this is so often how we get our selves back.

Anne Lamott

Can you imagine the hopelessness of trying to live a spiritual life when you’re secretly looking up at the skies not for illumination or direction, but to gauge, miserably, the odds of rain?

Anne Lamott

I try to write the books I would love to come upon that are honest, concerned with real lives, human hearts, spiritual transformation, families, secrets, wonder, craziness - and that can make me laugh.

Anne Lamott

...It really IS easier to experience spiritual connection when your life is in the process of coming apart.

Danny Boyle

I kind of call myself an atheist, I suppose - although quite a spiritual atheist, I hope.

Daniel Baldwin

At the end of the spectrum when you get to that 12th step, when you have that spiritual awakening we make ourselves available to help other people.

Dani Shapiro

What's more important that spiritual life? It seems to me it's the bedrock of everything essential about being human.

Dani Shapiro

From spiritual connection springs kindness, connection, social activism, and love.

Dani Shapiro

The fact is that most husbands, regardless of religion - it's an old-fashioned gender divide where the husband wants to stay home and the wife is the one who drags herself and her children to whatever spiritual center they're going to.

Dani Shapiro

Part of my spiritual work is learning to live with the knowledge that we can't protect our loved ones from pain and heartache.

Dag Hammarskjold

Unless there is a spiritual renaissance, the world will know no peace.

Dag Hammarskjold

I am the vessel. The draft is God's. And God is the thirsty one.

Daisaku Ikeda

The profound unity of subjective existence and objective environment leads naturally to the idea that the life-force of one human being can affect other living beings and even the fundamental being of humankind as a whole. Furthermore, the minds of humankind fuse into one and exert a continuous influence, both physical and spiritual, on other living beings and on the whole of nature.

Dante Alighieri

"The love of God, unutterable and perfect, flows into a pure soul the way light rushes into a transparent object. The more love that it finds, the more it gives itself: so that, as we grow clear and open, the more complete the joy of heaven is. And the more souls who resonate together, the greater the intensity of their love, and, mirror like, each soul reflects the other.

Dante Alighieri

Here my powers rest from their high fantasy, but already I could feel my being turned- instinct and intellect balanced equally. as in a wheel whose motion nothing jars- by the Love that moves the Sun and the other stars.

Daniel Libeskind

Don't look at the superficial success, at the short-term success. Look at the deep spiritual questions that architecture has to answer. Who do you build for? Where? What should you build?

Dan Millman

Our practices - our most spiritual practices - are hanging laundry on the line, raising children, building strong relationships, practicing kindness as much as we can, striving for excellence in the workplace, and developing deeper self-knowledge. I wrote The Four Purposes of Life to assist in these endeavors.

Dan Millman

If there is a central theme to what I called "a peaceful warrior's approach to living," and to The Four Purposes of Life, it is that there may be innumerable techniques or methods one can learn (from the Eastern spiritual cultures and from the Western psychological tradition), but that above and beyond all these technologies waits the school of everyday life.

Dan Millman

Inward spiritual practices such as meditation, breathing techniques and self-analysis generate insights and enhance abilities, but none are so useful as learning to live harmoniously in a committed relationship, being a skillful parent, or juggling the demands of daily life.

Dan Millman

When we align our lives with spiritual laws, challenges remain, but we can approach them with arms open wide, ready to dance.

Dan Millman

Enlightenment is not an attainment; it is a realization. And when you wake up, everything changes and nothing changes. If a blind man realizes that he can see, has the world changed?

Dan Millman

Surrender means accepting this moment, this body, and this life with open arms. Surrender involves getting out of your own way and living in accord with a higher will, expressed as the wisdom of the heart. Far more than passive acceptance, surrender uses every challenge as a means of spiritual growth and expanded awareness.

Dan Millman

A Zen student asked his roshi the most important element of Zen.The roshi replied, "Attention." "Yes, thank you," the student replied. "But can you tell me the second most important element?"And the roshi replied, "Attention."

Corrie Ten Boom

We are up against the unseen power that controls this dark world and the spiritual agents are from the very headquarters of evil. Therefore, we must wear the "whole armour of God," that we may be able to resist evil in its day of power, and that even when we have fought to a standstill, we may still stand our ground.

Cornel West

I think the important thing to understand first and foremost about Michael Jackson is that he was the international emblem of the African American blues spiritual impulse that goes back through slavery - Jim Crow, Jane Crow, up to the present moment, through a Louis Armstrong, through a Ma Rainey, through a Bessie Smith, all the way to John Coltrane, Aretha Franklin and Nina Simone.