Religious Experiences Quotes & Sayings

Everything that God puts in our life is a lesson, even the bad experiences. Learn from them, adjust your direction, grow and move on. — Claudia McCants

The inflamed sensitivity induced by radicalized democratic theory finally experiences any limit as arbitrary and tyrannical. There are no absolutes; freedom is absolute. Of course the result is that, on the one hand, the argument justifying freedom disappears and, on the other, all beliefs begin to have the attenuated character that was initially supposed to be limited to religious belief. — Allan Bloom

All religions are born from individual experiences of divine awakening, not from some books. — Abhijit Naskar

If she were religious, she would call it the soul. It is more than the sum of her intellect and her emotions, more than the sum of her experiences, though it runs like veins of brilliant metal through all three. It is an inner faculty that recognizes the animating mysteries of the world because it is made of the same substance — Michael Cunningham

The fact that people have religious experiences is interesting from the psychological point of view, but it does not in any way imply that there is such a thing as religious knowledge ... Unless he can formulate this 'knowledge' in propositions that are empirically verifiable, we may be sure that he is deceiving himself. — A.J. Ayer

Your past experiences are past indeed; those strains and emotions of sensuous life are gone and what has remained is the temple of your own building, that edifice not built by hands. The reality of you is in the invisible, the intangible. In retrospect your spiritual milestones stand stronger to you in their fixed position than any outward experience. Having arrived at this understanding try now, quietly, gently, without too much effort of self-discipline, to keep to the invisible, train yourself to keep immaterial. Watching and praying are essential. When hard pressed by old habits and you are under the heavy blanketings of times and events, you, as it were, disappear. This is the moment to step back into the invisible, for then the invisible will enfold you and give you great power in the visible world. — Mary Strong

He had heard religious people talk about having revelatory experiences. Like there was one moment where everything became clear to them and all the crap and ephemera just floated away. It had always seemed pretty unlikely to him. But the Ed Nicholls had one such moment in a log cabin beside a stretch of water that might have been a lake, or might well have been a canal for all he could tell ... And he realized in that moment that he had to make things right. — Jojo Moyes

As to science, we may well define it for our purpose as "methodical thinking directed toward finding regulative connections between our sensual experiences". — Albert Einstein

Each of us has a sophisticated system that throws away most of our experiences, keeps only a few choice samples, mixes them up with bits from movies we've seen, novels we've read, speeches we've heard, and daydreams we've savoured, and out of all that jumble it weaves a seemingly coherent story about who I am, where I came from and where I am going. This story tells me what to love, whom to hate and what to do with myself. This story may even cause me to sacrifice my life, if that's what the plot requires. We all have our genre. Some people live a tragedy, others inhabit a never-ending religious drama, some approach life as if it were an action film, and not a few act as if in a comedy. But in the end, they are all just stories. What, — Yuval Noah Harari

I have not learned a single lesson, been inspired or impacted by another person's life void of negative experiences. — John Paul Warren

I believe we should really take our own phenomenology more seriously. What a good theory of conscious must explain is the variance in this subjective sense of realness: There clearly is a phenomenology of "hyperrealness", for example during religious experiences or under the influence of certain psychoactive substances. — Thomas Metzinger

There are, then, three sorts of religious experiences. The ancient rites, which are essentially propitiatory. The mysteries, which purge the soul and allow us to glimpse eternity. And philosophy, which attempts to define not only the material world but to suggest practical ways to the good life, as well as attempting to synthesize (as Iamblichos does so beautifully) all true religion in a single comprehensive system. — Gore Vidal

There is no question that many religious disciplines can produce interesting experiences in suitable minds. It should be clear, however, that engaging a faith-based (and probably delusional) practice, whatever its effects, isn't the same as investigating the nature of one's mind absent any doctrinal assumptions. — Sam Harris

Yes, we inevitably turn to God; for this religious sentiment is of its nature so pure, so delightful to the soul that experiences it, that it makes up to us for all our other losses. — Aldous Huxley

There's a part of the human brain, the temporal lobe, that is associated with religious experiences as well as with epilepsy. — Ken MacLeod

Religion means goal and way, politics implies end and means. The political end is recognizable by the fact that it may be attained
in success
and its attainment is historically recorded. The religious goal remains, even in man's highest experiences, that which simply provides direction on the mortal way; it never enters into historical consummation. — Martin Buber

Adjusting to any marriage, let alone a plural one, is an incredibly individual experience, and it is all-encompassing. Your entire worldview and your entire cultural, personal, and religious awareness goes through a radical upheaval. You barely have time to worry about what's going on in the outside world. I found that I had to do so much work readjusting my own parameters and shifting my own perspectives that I didn't think too much about my mother's parallel experiences. — Janelle Brown

Along with the violent tonic-clonic seizure, it turned out I had also been experiencing complex partial seizures because of overstimulation in my temporal lobes, generally considered to be the most "ticklish" part of the brain. The temporal lobe houses the ancient structures of the hippocampus and the amygdala, the parts of the brain responsible for emotion and memory. The symptoms from this type of seizure can range from a "Christmas morning" feeling of euphoria to sexual arousal to religious experiences. — Susannah Cahalan

It is not that suffering or failure might happen, or that it will only happen to you if you are bad (which is what religious people often think), or that it will happen to the unfortunate, or to a few in other places, or that you can somehow by cleverness or righteousness avoid it. No, it will happen, and to you! Losing, failing, falling, sin, and the suffering that comes from those experiences - all of this is a necessary and even good part of the human journey. — Richard Rohr

The evolutionary vision is agnostic in regard to systems in the universe of greater complexity than those of which human beings have clear knowledge. It recognizes aesthetic, moral, and religious ideas and experiences as a species, in this case of mental structures or of images, which clearly interacts with other species in the world's great' ecosystem. — Kenneth E. Boulding

The years move forward and everyone is attending to their life's priorities, focusing on how to be happy, make a living, raise a family. The years turn into decades and sooner or later, (hopefully later) sickness or accidents happen and all are again confronted with the big questions: Why? What's next? What has this life that I've lived been about? As one begins to consider their own eventual departure: What have I been able to do to make things a little better? What have I passed along to make others' lives more beautiful? — Gene O'Neil

Men may believe what they cannot prove. They may not be put to the proof of their religious doctrines or beliefs. Religious experiences which are as real as life to some may be incomprehensible to others. — William O. Douglas

We don't yet have a body of scientific knowledge about evil to be called a facet of psychology. Therefore, religious reasoning for actions will always be at the discretion of the psychologist, thus making them the judge and jury over what is delusion and what is a spiritual experience that has to be sedated. — Shannon L. Alder

As a mode of perception that often becomes a style of life, paranoia weaves around the vulnerable self or group an air-tight metaphysic and world view. Paranoia is an antireligious mysticism based on the feeling or perception that the world in general, and others in particular, are against me or us. Reality is perceived as hostile. By contrast, the religious mystic experiences the ground of being as basically friendly to the deepest needs of the self. That which is unknown, strange, or beyond our comprehension is with and for rather than against us. — Sam Keen

Israel is a very young country, a cultural melting pot, and unlike the structured life of the Orthodox Jews, I grew up in a non-religious part of society where people were totally open to new experiences on many levels. I learned that when things are missing, you invent them. — Noma Bar

I think that our experiences are quite often colored by our cultural and religious beliefs. — Rosemary Ellen Guiley

The soul conceives, the mind creates, the body experiences. The circle is complete. — Neale Donald Walsch

I know many people who believe in God, and I expected to find Him on my way to the South Pole if he exists. My religious experiences were very different however, [only] involving myself, nature and the universe. — Liv Arnesen

It is tragic to see how the religious sentiment of the West has become so individualized that concepts such as "a contrite heart," have come to refer only to the personal experiences of guilt and willingness to do penance for it. The awareness of our impurity in thoughts, words and deeds can indeed put us in a remorseful mood and create in us the hope for a forgiving gesture. But if the catastrophical events of our days, the wars, mass murders, unbridled violence, crowded prisons, torture chambers, the hunger and the illness of millions of people and he unnamable misery of a major part of the human race is safely kept outside the solitude of our hearts, our contrition remains no more than a pious emotion. — Henri J.M. Nouwen

There is little mysticism without an element of transcendence, and conversely, there is no transcendence without a certain degree of egocentrism. It may be that the genesis of these experiences is to be sought in the unique situation of the very young child in relation to adults. The theory of the filial origin of the religious sense seems to us singularly convincing in this connection. — Jean Piaget

My greatest experiences in the theatre and the most religious experiences in my life - of which going to the opera is one for me - have been with the Romantic composers' repertoire: it's Wagner, it's Strauss, Verdi, Puccini. That era gets me every time. — Rufus Wainwright

A religion made up solely of heightened religious experiences would not be a religion at all ... The major religious traditions address the mysteries (with or without entheogens), but they have other business to do: widen understanding, give meaning, provide solace, promote loving-kindness, and connect human being to human being. — Huston Smith

To sum it up, from this point of view, the two religions of mankind tend to be the peakers and the non-peakers, that is to say, those who have private, personal, transcendent, core-religious experiences easily and often and who accept them and make use of them, and, on the other hand, those who have never had them or who repress or suppress them and who, therefore, cannot make use of them for their personal therapy, personal growth, or personal fulfillment. — Abraham H. Maslow

One need not believe in Pallas Athena, the virgin goddess, to be overwhelmed by the Parthenon. Similarly, a man who rejects all dogmas, all theologies and all religious formulations of beliefs may still find Genesis the sublime book par excellence. Experiences and aspirations of which intimations may be found in Plato, Nietzsche, and Spinoza have found their most evocative expression in some sacred books. Since the Renaissance, Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Mozart, and a host of others have shown that this religious dimension can be experienced and communicated apart from any religious context. But that is no reason for closing my heart to Job's cry, or to Jeremiah's, or to the Second Isaiah. I do not read them as mere literature; rather, I read Sophocles and Shakespeare with all my being, too. — Walter Kaufmann

it cannot be the purpose of Scripture to provide us with certified information about some entity outside its story about us, whether that third entity be God or certain classical religious experiences or the theological history of Israel and the primal church or whatever. Since we and Scripture and what Scripture talks about are not external to one another, since Scripture tells a story about God and us that we are even now living, there is no position from which such exchanges could be conducted - perhaps not even God has such an Archimedean point. This observation kills two historically instantiated errors with one stone. — Ellen F. Davis

Having been exposed to a variety of religious experiences in the foster homes I lived in, being Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, or anything else means absolutely nothing to me. I have already formed an opinion that the so-called religious teachings that I've been exposed to simply make no sense. So, I've just ignored the Sunday-school message of fear and judgment and paid no attention to any of it. I see no need for all of this craziness in my life, and long ago decided not to participate in it because every time I was required to go to church I ended up feeling worse for the experience - and I want, more than anything, to feel good. — Wayne W. Dyer

When I became religious, it was full-force for me. And, through the lifestyle of being out on the road with non-Jewish musicians, in non-Jewish nightclubs and going all over the world - getting out of the shtetl - opened me up to having experiences that other religious men might not have to think or worry about. — Matisyahu

Total experiences, of which there are many kinds, tend again and again to be apprehended only as revivals or translations of the religious imagination. To try to make a fresh way of talking at the most serious, ardent, and enthusiastic level, heading off the religious encapsulation, is one of the primary intellectual tasks of future thought. — Susan Sontag

A supremely religious man or woman is one who believes deeply and consistently in the veracity of his highest experiences. He has his hours in the cellar ... but he believes in the truth of the hours he spends upstairs. — Harry Emerson Fosdick

Entheogens are not to be lightly trifled with ... However, if taken with the right attitude and in the proper setting, psychoactive drugs may produce religious experiences ... it is far less clear that they can produce religious lives. — Huston Smith

I think what happens in a religious life is that we have those experiences of affirmation and that one starts to live a Christian life or a Jewish life or a Muslim life or a Buddhist life, by affirming that affirmation each day. Each day you say 'Yes' to that Yes. So the life of being a Christian for example, is always a life of double affirmation, that you each day say 'Yes' to those counter-experiences of saying 'Yes', even when you're not experiencing them at that time, you're remaining loyal to that experience. — Kevin Hart

Physical processes alone will never completely explain the existence of the universe , life , and consciousness . Religious answers are just wishful thinking and wanton fabrication cast over a bottomless pit of ignorance . To explain their occult and mystical experiences , magicians are forced to develop models beyond the scope of materialistic or religious systems . — Peter J. Carroll

What I find more remarkable, however, is how readily many people in our society believe outlandish and unsubstantiated urban myths and conspiracies (Pop Rocks and Coke, JFK assassination, AIDS is man-made, etc.), yet disregard thousands of personal and consistent testimonies of miracles and near-death experiences from people throughout all cultures and religions. — Mary C. Neal

Your religious beliefs typically depend on the community in which you were raised or live. The spiritual experiences of people in ancient Greece, medieval Japan or 21st-century Saudi Arabia do not lead to belief in Christianity. It seems, therefore, that religious belief very likely tracks not truth but social conditioning." - Gary Gutting, "The Stone," New York Times, September 14, 2011 — Peter Boghossian

And here, for me, is another profound truth: understanding, as well as truth, comes not only from the intellect but also from the body. When we begin to listen to our bodies, we begin to listen to reality through our own experiences; we begin to trust our intuition, our hearts. The truth is also in the "earth" of our own bodies. So it is a question of moving from theories we have learned to listening to the reality that is in and around us. Truth flows from the earth. This is not to deny the truth that flows from teachers, from books, from tradition, from our ancestors, and from religious faith. But the two must come together. Truth from the sky must be confirmed and strengthened by truth from the earth. We must learn to listen and then to communicate. — Jean Vanier

Love must be regarded as one of the religious and dangerous experiences, because it lifts people out of the arms of reason and sets them afloat with no ground under their feet. — Robert Musil

The basic religious idea in all patriarchal religions is the negation of the sexual needs. Only in very primitive religions were religiosity and sexuality identical. When social organization passed from matriarchy to patriarchy and class society, the unity of religious and sexual cult underwent a split; the religious cult became the antithesis of the sexual. With that, the cult of sexuality went out of existence. It was replaced by the brothel, pornography and backstairs-sexuality. It goes without saying that when sexual experiences ceased to be one with the religious cults, when, instead, they became antithetical to them, religious excitation assumed a new function: that of being a substitute for the lost sexual pleasure, now no longer affirmed by society. Only this contradiction inherent in religious excitation makes the strength and the tenacity of the religions understandable: the contradiction of its being at one and the same time antisexual and a substitute for sexuality. — Wilhelm Reich

How irrelevant the belief in God can be to religious experience - so irrelevant that the emotional structure of religious experiences can be transplanted to completely godless contexts with little of the impact lost - and when he had also, almost as an afterthought, included as an appendix thirty-six arguments for the existence of God, with rebuttals, his claim being that the most thorough demolition of these arguments would make little difference to the felt qualities of religious experience, — Rebecca Goldstein

Having lost religious faith and the humanistic values bound up with it, he [man] concentrated on technical and material values and lost the capacity for deep emotional experiences, for the joy and sadness that accompany them. — Erich Fromm

With experience as their guiding light, Christian monks and nuns could, for example, come together with Sufis and Yogis to pray and meditate, then discuss their experiences by talking about how silence and inner peace have changed their lives, instead of talking about the content of their prayers or focusing on theology. Hindus, Christians, and Muslims, who tread the path of goodness, could come together and do good works. Doing good side by side would show them that they are not as different as previously thought and that their various beliefs can lead to similar outcomes. — Gudjon Bergmann

The renaissance of interest in Eastern spiritual philosophies, various mystical traditions, meditation, ancient and aboriginal wisdom, as well as the widespread psychedelic experimentation during the stormy 1960s, made it absolutely clear that a comprehensive and cross-culturally valid psychology had to include observations from such areas as mystical states; cosmic consciousness; psychedelic experiences; trance phenomena; creativity; and religious, artistic, and scientific inspiration. — Stanislav Grof

I think these drugs could just as well be called Durkheimogens, given their unique (though unreliable) ability to shut down the self and give people experiences they later describe as "religious" or — Jonathan Haidt

That the idea of God represents the conscience, the internalized admonitions and threats from parents and educators, is a well-known fact. What is less well known is the fact that, from an energy point of view, the belief in and the fear of God are sexual excitations which have changed their content and goal. The religious feeling, then, is the same as sexual feeling, except that it is attached to mystical, psychic contents. This explains the return of the sexual element in so many ascetic experiences, such as the nun's delusion that she is the bride of Christ. Such experiences rarely reach the stage of genital consciousness and thus are apt to take place in other sexual channels, such as masochistic martyrdom. — Wilhelm Reich

I have met countless people who call themselves Christians who don't appear to have any living breathing vibrant connection with the resurrected Christ and I've met countless people from every religious background including atheists that tell me of their very personal and real experiences of the living Christ. I don't have people asking me why they should believe something - that's starting off on the wrong foot to say the least. — Rob Bell

Religious experiences are real and common, whether or not God exists, and these experiences often make people whole and at peace. — Jonathan Haidt

The experiences which we have been studying during this hour (and a great many other kinds of religious experiences are like them) plainly show the universe to be a more many-sided affair than any sect, even the scientific sect, allows for. What, in the end, are all our verifications but experiences that agree with more or less isolated systems of ideas (conceptual systems) that our minds have framed? — William James

When we think "prophetic" we need not always think grandly about public tasks. The prophetic task needs to be done wherever there are men and women who will yield to the managed prose future offered them by the king. So, we may ask, if we are to do that alternative constructive task of imagination, if we are to reach more than the most surface group prepared to be "religious," where do we begin? What I propose is this: The royal consciousness leads people to numbness, especially to numbness about death. It is the task of prophetic ministry and imagination to bring people to engage their experiences of suffering to death. — Walter Brueggemann

The key to entering into the Divine Exchange is never our worthiness but always God's graciousness. Any attempt to measure or increase our worthiness will always fall short, or it will force us into the position of denial and pretend, which produces the constant perception of hypocrisy in religious people.
To switch to an "economy of grace" is a switch that is very hard for humans to make. We base almost everything in human culture on achievement, performance, accomplishment, an equal exchange value, or some kind of worthiness gauge. I call it meritocracy. Unless one personally experiences a dramatic and personal breaking of the rules of merit (forgiveness or undeserved goodness), it is almost impossible to disbelieve or operate outside of its rigid logic. This cannot happen theoretically or abstractly. It cannot happen "out there" but must be known personally "in here. — Richard Rohr

The Australian Aboriginal cave paintings, from this period, are the first hints of religion that humans have as proof of religious behaviour. The caves in which the paintings are found date to 50,000 years ago through forensic geology and carbon dating. Most of the images found in their religious stories and ceremonies are depicted in these caves. We also have confirmation from the aborigines themselves that these images are their religious images. These paintings also are likely to be significant evidence for linking the use of Amanita Muscaria to its use 50,000 years ago. This is because 50,000 years ago was when humanity entered Australia and also because Amanita Muscaria produces religious like experiences. — Leviak B. Kelly

The love that exists between people who share religious values and experiences can be the most satisfying and unifying force this side of the solid, happy family. — M. Russell Ballard

In the experiences of a year of the Presidency, there has come to me no other such unwelcome impression as the manifest religious intolerance which exists among many of our citizens. I hold it to be a menace to the very liberties we boast and cherish. — Warren G. Harding

In modern neurotheology we examine the physical bases to spiritual, religious and mystical experiences and beliefs, that implicitly appear to reduce this rich phenomenology to only neuronal functions. So, the thing is, there was no divine intervention necessary in the evolution of spirituality and religiosity. "Human Brain is the true God of all beliefs". — Abhijit Naskar

They did indeed use the AM in religious rituals and AM does have deliriant and hallucinatory effects and more. This would mean not only is it linked to religion and religious social structures in the ceremony, but there is a significant link that it produced these experiences by way of muscimol induced hallucinations. Since its consumption began fifty thousand years ago, it would put its use on the very beginning of religion itself. The idea that this is somehow a fallacy is far from the truth as not only is there a religious connection but the connection began at the same time. — Leviak B. Kelly

We define Christian spiritual direction then, as help given by one Christian to another which enables the person to pay attention to God's personal communication to him or her, to respond to this personally communicating God, to grow in intimacy with this God and to live out the consequences of the relationship. The focus of this type of spiritual direction is on experiences, not on ideas, and specifically religious experiences, i.e., any experience of the mysterious Other whom we call God. Moreover, this experience is viewed, not as an isolated event, but as an ongoing expression of the ongoing personal relationship God has established with each one of us. — Jeannette A. Bakke

Worship in truth is worship that arises out of an actual encounter with God, a response to the experience of knowing God's real presence and activity in our daily lives. This has nothing to do with sentiment, thinking religious thoughts or having aesthetic experiences in church buildings; any religion can give you that sort of thing. — Graham Kendrick

If we will walk humbly with our God, He will lead us by the hand to exactly who and what we need, to those people, things, and experiences He has designed and intended for us, and this alone will be the cause of our deep fulfillment and happiness. — Matthew Kelly

Many poets are not poets for the same reason that many religious men are not saints: they never succeed in being themselves. They never get around to being the particular poet or the particular monk they are intended to be by God. They never become the man or the artist who is called for by all the circumstances of their individual lives. They waste their years in vain efforts to be some other poet, some other saint ... They wear out their minds and bodies in a hopeless endeavor to have somebody else's experiences or write somebody else's poems. — Thomas Merton

We can work together for a better world with men and women of goodwill, those who radiate the intrinsic goodness of humankind. To do so effectively, the world needs a global ethic with values which give meaning to life experiences and, more than religious institutions and dogmas, sustain the non-material dimension of humanity. Mankind's universal values of love, compassion, solidarity, caring and tolerance should form the basis for this global ethic which should permeate culture, politics, trade, religion and philosophy. It should also permeate the extended family of the United Nations. — Wangari Maathai

The function of the church for both young and old is not to give us on Sundays certain kinds of experiences different from experiences of the every day. The function of the church is rather to teach us how to put religious and ethical qualities into all kinds of experiences. — Sophia Lyon Fahs

Instead of being overwhelmed by the universe, I think that perhaps one of the deepest experiences a scientist can have, almost approaching a religious awakening, is to realize that we are children of the stars, and that our minds are capable of understanding the universal laws that they obey. The atoms within our bodies were forged on the anvil of nucleo-synthesis within an exploding star aeons before the birth of the solar system. Our atoms are older than the mountains. We are literally made of star dust. Now these atoms, in turn, have coalesced into intelligent beings capable of understanding the universal laws governing that event. — Michio Kaku

I studied history in college, and I've always enjoyed reading, especially political biographies, and I can state that in all my studies and all my experiences, I have come across just one truly honest politician: my great-grandfather, William Eichner. ... According to my grandmother, when he was elected to the General Assembly, he stopped going to religious services and never set foot in a church during his two terms in office, stating, "You can't serve God and politics at the same time". — John W. Hartmann

Human inheritance is both blessing and curse. And in religious inheritance this paradox is acute. For many of us religion is heavy baggage. Stories of love and fear, liberation and constriction, grace and malice come not only from our own experiences, and our family's past, but from an ancestral history within a tradition. What curses do we need to shed, in the process of growing up? What can we hold to, as blessing? — Kathleen Norris

The global nature of the religious knowledge of a learned Muslim sitting in Isfahan in the fourteenth century was very different from that of a scholastic thinker in Paris or Bologna of the same period. On the basis of the Quranic doctrine of religious universality and the vast historical experiences of a global nature, Islamic civilization developed a cosmopolitan and worldwide religious perspective unmatched before the modern period in any other religion. This global vision is still part and parcel of the worldview of traditional Muslims, of those who have not abandoned their universal vision as a result of the onslaught of modernism or reactions to this onslaught in the form of what has come to be called fundamentalism. — Seyyed Hossein Nasr

Be wicked, be brave, be drunk, be reckless, be dissolute, be despotic, be an anarchist, be a religious fanatic, be a suffragette, be anything you like, but for pity's sake be it to the top of your bent - Live - live fully, live passionately, live disastrously if necessary. Live the gamut of human experiences, build, destroy, build up again! Live, let's live, you and I - let's live as none ever lived before, let's explore and investigate, let's tread fearlessly where even the most intrepid have faltered and held back! — Violet Trefusis

Let's Look at Subjective Religious Experiences This Way:
What if ten thousand people went up to a mountain top, saw something, and then they all disagreed with what they saw, even people who largely agreed with each other? Even with this best possible analogy to subjective religious experiences we would still have a reason to think the lack of oxygen caused them all to hallucinate. — John W. Loftus

I find myself seeking out the commonalities of our different religious experiences with hopes of encouraging, through my writings, the most hopeful, loving and redemptive qualities in all of us. — Richard Paul Evans