Famous Quotes & Sayings

L. Neil Smith

Only someone as puffed up and demented as John Maynard Keynes, every left wing fascist's sainted mentor in this connection, could manage to convince himself that taxing America's Productive Class can restore it to prosperity. In point of fact, it's like screwing for chastity, guzzling alcohol for sobriety, or gorging to fight gluttony. It's like killing indiscriminately for peace oops, Democrats, Republicans and their moral and spiritual ilk have devoutly believed that particular bit of perverse nonsense since at least the War of 1812.

Pablo Picasso

I have always believed and still believe that artists who live and work with spiritual values cannot and should not remain indifferent to the conflict in which the highest values of humanity and civilization are at stake.

The natural principle of sowing and reaping is always at work. Whatever you plant , whether physical, spiritual, mental, financial, relational, or emotional, will grow and someday return to you in a multiplied fashion. It can be incredibly good or terribly bad, depending on your seed.

Paul Brunton

No man who has lived through a temporary spiritual experience is ever likely to forget it. His days will be haunted until he sets out to seek ways and means of repeating it.

Paul Brunton

When spiritual seeking becomes too complicated, its exercies too elaborated, its doctrines too esoteric, it becomes also too artificial and the resulting achievements too fabricated. It is the beginners and intermediates who carry this heavy and unnecessary burden, who involve themselves to the point of becoming neurotics.

Paul Brunton

Such excessive preoccupation with his faults is not a truly spiritual activity but, on the contrary, a highly egoistic one.The recognition of his own faults should make a man humbler, when it is beneficial, not prouder, which the thought that he ought to have been above these faults makes him.

Paul Brunton

The world is our school for spiritual discovery.

Paul Brunton

Worry is spiritual short sight... Its cure is intelligent faith...

Paul Brunton

Whoever accepts the higher mission of art and comes nearer and nearer to it through his creative activity, will then go on from art to the Spirit deep within his own self... The philosophic search for enlightenment and the artist's search for perfection of work can meet and unite. Art can be a path to spiritual enlightenment but not to complete and lasting enlightenment. It can be born out of, and can give birth itself to, only Glimpses. For art is a search for beauty, which by itself is not enough. Beauty must be supported by virtue and both require wisdom to guide them.

Paul Brunton

Man is more miserable, more restless and unsatisfied than ever before, simply because half his nature--the spiritual--is starving for true food, and the other half--the material--is fed with bad food.

Patti LaBelle

When you take your troubles to God, you may have them but they don't have you.

Oscar Wilde

In his very rejection of art Walt Whitman is an artist. He tried to produce a certain effect by certain means and he succeeded....He stands apart, and the chief value of his work is in its prophecy, not in its performance. He has begun a prelude to larger themes. He is the herald to a new era. As a man he is the precursor of a fresh type. He is a factor in the heroic and spiritual evolution of the human being. If Poetry has passed him by, Philosophy will take note of him.

Ivan Turgenev

Art, if one employs this term in the broad sense that includes poetry within its realm, is an art of creation laden with ideals, located at the very core of the life of a people, defining the spiritual and moral shape of that life.

Iris Murdoch

... a less than perfect meddling in the spiritual world can breed monsters for other people.

Idries Shah

Like the bat, the Sufi is asleep to 'things of the day' - the familiar struggle for existence which the ordinary man finds all-important - and vigilant while others are asleep. In other words, he keeps awake the spiritual attention dormant in others. That 'mankind sleeps in a nightmare of unfulfillment' is a commonplace of Sufi literature

Idries Shah

The main problem is that most commentators are accustomed to thinking of spiritual schools as 'systems', which are more or less alike, and which depend upon dogma and ritual: and especially upon repetition and the application of continual and standardised pressures upon their followers.The Sufi way, except in degenerate forms which are not to be classified as Sufic, is entirely different from this.

Idries Shah

Enlightenment must come little by little - otherwise it would overwhelm.

Huston Smith

Swami Ashokananda was a brilliant and accomplished spiritual teacher in the West.

Huston Smith

It must have been providence that directed Joel Morwood to dig in the right place, for he struck a lode of pure gold, as wide (comprehensive) as it is deep (profound). What he mined from that lode is a spiritual treasure.

Huston Smith

Built into human makeup is a longing for a 'more' that the world of everyday experience cannot requite.

Huston Smith

The goal of spiritual life is not altered states, but altered traits

Gloria Steinem

I feel this is very much our spiritual and political duty to be part of every peace table, it has often been the case that citizenry -- women and men -- can make progress when it is not possible for the officials to be able to meet at that moment in time.

If peace is our single aim in all we do, we will always know what to do because we will do whatever will protect and deepen our peace.

Harry S Truman

I fear we are too much concerned with material things to remember that our real strength lies in spiritual values.

Harry S Truman

Divine Providence has played a great part in our history. I have the feeling that God has created us and brought us to our present position of power and strength for some great purpose. It is not given to us to know fully what that purpose is, but I think we may be sure of one thing, and that is that our country is intended to do all it can, in cooperating with other nations to help created peace and preserve peace in the world. It is given to defend the spiritual values-the moral code-against the vast forces of evil that seek to destroy them.

Nancy Pearcey

The best organizations regard the nurturing of their employees as a spiritual mandate.

If men had been forbidden to make porridge of camel's dung, they would have done it, saying that they would not have been forbidden to do it unless there had been some good in it.

Allah(God) is the greatest friend.

Ken Wilber

So it is a good idea to start simple, I think, and be very careful. There is a spiritual opening in the Kosmos. Let us be careful of how we fill it. The simplest is: Spirit or Emptiness is unqualifiable, but it is not inert and unyielding, for it gives rise to manifestation itself: new forms emerge, and that creativity is ultimate. Emptiness, creativity, holons.

Ken Wilber

Religion is just coded spirituality.

Ken Wilber

Meditation, then, is not so much a part of this or that particular religion, but rather part of the universal spiritual culture of all humankind--an effort to bring awareness to bear on all aspects of life. It is, in other words, part of what has been called the perennial philosophy.

Ken Wilber

Authentic spirituality... does not render the self content, it renders it undone.

Ken Wilber

The very desire to seek spiritual enlightenment is in fact nothing but the grasping tendency of the ego itself, and thus the very search for enlightenment prevents it. The 'perfect practice' is therefore not to search for enlightenment but to inquire into the motive for seeking itself. You obviously seek in order to avoid the present, and yet the present alone holds the answer: to seek forever is to miss the point forever. You always already are enlightened Spirit, and therefore to seek Spirit is simply to deny Spirit.