Woman/Blonde/Water

38 Quotes About Spirituality That Prove It's More About Being Human Than Religious

Religion is for those who don't want to go to hell, and spirituality is for those who have already been there.
Brianna Wiest
August 13, 2016
“Every great change is preceded by chaos.”
— Deepak Chopra, No Title
Tagged: Change, Chaos, Being Lost, inspiration
“When the brain lights up, its activity is like a radio lighting up when music is played. It is an obvious fallacy to say that the radio composed the music. What is being viewed is only a physical correlation, not a cause.”
— Deepak Chopra, Good News: You Are Not Your Brain
Tagged: Philosophy, Psychology, The Person You'll Become
“Pain is not the same as suffering. Left to itself, the body discharges pain spontaneously, letting go of it the moment that the underlying cause is healed. Suffering is pain that we hold on to. It comes from the mind’s mysterious instinct to believe that pain is good, or that it cannot be escaped, or that the person deserves it.’”
— Deepak Chopra, The Book of Secrets: Unlocking the Hidden Dimensions of Your Life
Tagged: Suffering, Pain, Moving On, forgiveness
“Do you realize that your refusal to utter the word 'love' to your lover has created a force field all its own? Withholding distorts reality. It makes the people who do the withholding ugly and small-hearted. It makes the people from whom things are withheld crazy and desperate and incapable of knowing what they actually feel.”
— Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar
Tagged: Love, How to be good at love
“Nobody will protect you from your suffering. You can't cry it away or eat it away or starve it away or walk it away or punch it away or even therapy it away. It's just there, and you have to survive it.”
— Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar
Tagged: Love, Survival, Suffering
“Do you think miners stand around all day talking about how hard it is to mine for coal? They do not. They simply dig.”
— Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar
Tagged: Writing, Writers, How to be a writer
“The story of human intimacy is one of constantly allowing ourselves to see those we love most deeply in a new, more fractured light. Look hard. Risk that.”
— Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar
Tagged: Love, How to be good at love
“Sometimes the greatest truth isn't in the confession but rather in the lesson learned.”
— Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar
Tagged: Life
“Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Modern Library Classics)
“I believe in God, but not as one thing, not as an old man in the sky. I believe that what people call God is something in all of us. I believe that what Jesus and Mohammed and Buddha and all the rest said was right. It's just that the translations have gone wrong.”
— John Lennon, The John Lennon Letters
“Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality.”
— Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
“Forgive the past. It is over. Learn from it and let go. People are constantly changing and growing. Do not cling to a limited, disconnected, negative image of a person in the past. See that person now. Your relationship is always alive and changing.”
— Brian Weiss, Many Lives, Many Masters: The True Story of a Prominent Psychiatrist, His Young Patient, and the Past-Life Therapy That Changed Both Their Lives
“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.”
— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man
“We are all connected; To each other, biologically. To the earth, chemically. To the rest of the universe atomically.”
— Neil deGrasse Tyson, Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries
“If you obsess over whether you are making the right decision, you are basically assuming that the universe will reward you for one thing and punish you for another.

The universe has no fixed agenda. Once you make any decision, it works around that decision. There is no right or wrong, only a series of possibilities that shift with each thought, feeling, and action that you experience.

If this sounds too mystical, refer again to the body. Every significant vital sign- body temperature, heart rate, oxygen consumption, hormone level, brain activity, and so on- alters the moment you decide to do anything… decisions are signals telling your body, mind, and environment to move in a certain direction.”
— Deepak Chopra, The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success: A Practical Guide to the Fulfillment of Your Dreams
“I have lived with several Zen masters -- all of them cats.”
— Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
“I've always felt like 'love at first sight' is reserved for people who don't have much to say.”
— George Watsky, How To Ruin Everything
Tagged: Essays, Love, Dating, Attraction
“Religion is for people who're afraid of going to hell. Spirituality is for those who've already been there.”
— Vine Deloria Jr., Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto
“If you don't behave as you believe, you will end by believing as you behave.”
— Fulton Sheen, Life of Christ
“I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.”
— Susan B. Anthony, History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I
“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom the emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand wrapped in awe, is as good as dead —his eyes are closed. The insight into the mystery of life, coupled though it be with fear, has also given rise to religion. To know what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms—this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of true religiousness.”
— Albert Einstein, The World As I See It
“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.”
— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man
“These things will destroy the human race: politics without principle, progress without compassion, wealth without work, learning without silence, religion without fearlessness, and worship without awareness.”
— Anthony DeMello, Awareness
“Love is not an emotion. It is your very existence.”
— Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, Celebrating Silence
“I understand once again that the greatness of God always reveals itself in the simple things.”
— Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist
“We're all pieces of the same ever-changing puzzle; some connected for mere seconds, some connected for life, some connected through knowledge, some through belief,
some connected through wisdom, some through Love, and some connected with no explanation at all. Yet, as spiritual beings having a human experience, we're all here for the sensations this reality or illusion has to offer. The best anyone can hope for is the right to be able to Live, Learn, Love then Leave. After that, reap the benefits of their own chosen existence in the hereafter by virtue of simply believing in what they believe. As for here, it took me a while but this progression helped me with my life: "I like myself. I Love myself. I am myself.”
— Stanley Victor Paskavich, Curse of the First Bite: An Epic Poem by Stanley Victor Paskavich
“Religion is for those who don't want to go to hell, and spirituality is for those who have already been there.”
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia
“Not till your thoughts cease all their branching here and there, not till you abandon all thoughts of seeking for something, not till your mind is motionless as wood or stone, will you be on the right road to the Gate.”
— Huang Po, The Zen Teachings of Huang Po: On The Transmission Of Mind
“The soil in which the meditative mind can begin is the soil of everyday life, the strife, the pain, and the fleeting joy. It must begin there, and bring order, and from there move endlessly. But if you are concerned only with making order, then that very order will bring about its own limitation, and the mind will be its prisoner. In all this movement you must somehow begin from the other end, from the other shore, and not always be concerned with this shore or how to cross the river. You must take a plunge into the water, not knowing how to swim. And the beauty of meditation is that you never know where you are, where you are going, what the end is.”
— Jiddu Krishnamurti, Freedom from the Known
“We tend to be preoccupied by our problems when we have a heightened sense of vulnerability and a diminished sense of power. Today, see each problem as an invitation to prayer.”
— John Ortberg Jr., Coping with Depression