Spiritual Metaphor Quotes & Sayings

If you are surprised by the things I say and do, then you really haven't paid attention to who I am. — Tanya Masse

Your Mom's Car. Think about that. Try to wrap your brain around the supernatural and spiritual implications that the name bears down you. Your Mom's Car, holding its hand out straight, fingers curled, a zombie reaching for your neck. — Dan Chaon

The garden is a metaphor for life, and gardening is a symbol of the spiritual path. — Larry Dossey

I feel comfortable, I'm definitely feeling challenged but with each day I gain more
experience. I'm just trying to improve each day. — Sidney Crosby

On the other hand, there is no sin in thought, word, or deed, no matter how personal or secret, that does not inflict injury upon the whole fellowship. An element of sickness gets into the body; perhaps nobody knows where it comes from or in what member it has lodged, but the body is infected. This is the proper metaphor for the Christian community. We are members of a body, not only when we choose to be, but in our whole existence. Every member serves the whole body, either to its health or to its destruction. This is no mere theory; it is a spiritual reality. And the Christian community has often experienced its effects with disturbing clarity, sometimes destructively and sometimes fortunately. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Why am I working so hard? Going for 400 books, perhaps, but who's really counting? — Jane Yolen

The spiritual muscles I hadn't used for decades began to acquire some tone, and since they were Catholic muscles too, it was natural to look for a church to work out in.

It was hard. Appalling though the predations exacted on the monastic liturgy were, they were nothing compared to the desecration exacted on the secular. Latin was gone entirely, replaced by dull, oppressive, anchorman English, slavishly translated from its sonorous source to be as plain and "direct" as possible. It didn't seem to have occurred to the well-meaning vandals who'd thrown out baby, bath, and bathwater that all ritual is a reaching out to the unknowable and can be accomplished only by the noncognitive: evocation, allusion, metaphor, incantation - the tools of the poet. — Tony Hendra

It is necessary to bring our life in order, to examine each thing, and ask ourselves if it is bringing power into our life or if it is draining us. Ask yourself, is your life taking power from you or adding power to you? — Frederick Lenz

We are all but symbols of some greater thing - totems of ourselves
subject to change and growth. When we forget that metaphoric sense of ourselves, we lose sight of the overall path. — S. Kelley Harrell

If you're looking for a spiritual allegory in the style of C.S. Lewis, I guess you could piece something together with Lorne Michaels as a symbol for God and my struggles with hair removal as a metaphor for virtue — Tina Fey

The claim in Psalms that "the heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament proclaims His works" (Psalms 19:2) is not a mere metaphor. The study of nature, even with all its intellectual rigor, is filled with spiritual wonder. — Gerald Schroeder

As societies trivialize traditional values, we witness a flow of immense suffering. We anguish, for instance, over what happens to the unborn, who cannot vote, and to children at risk. We weep over children having children and children shooting children. Often secular remedies to these challenges are not based on spiritual principles. To borrow a metaphor - secular remedies resemble an alarmed passenger traveling on the wrong train who tries to compensate by running up the aisle in the opposite direction! Only the acceptance of the revelations of God can bring both direction and correction and, in turn, bring a 'brightness of hope' (2 Ne. 31:20). Real hope does not automatically 'spring eternal' unless it is connected with eternal things! — Neal A. Maxwell

That bar also delineated the realm of sweat and hourly wage, the working world that college was educating me to leave. Rewards in that realm were few. No one congratulated you for clocking out. Your salary was spare. The Legion served as recompense. So the physical comforts you bouth there - hot boudain sausage and cold beer - had value. You attended the place, by which I mean you not only went there but gave it attention your job didn't deserve. Pool got shot not as metaphor for some corporate battle, but as itself alone. And the spiritual comforts-friendship, for instance - couldn't be confused with payback for something you'd accomplished, for in the Legion everybody punched the same clock, drew the same wage, won the same prize. — Mary Karr

The mechanism by which spirituality becomes passionate is metaphor. An ineffable God requires metaphor not only to be imagined but to be approached, exhorted, evaded, confronted, struggled with, and loved. Through metaphor, the vividness, intensity, and meaningfulness of ordinary experiences becomes the basis of a passionate spirituality. An ineffable God becomes vital through metaphor: The Supreme Being. The Prime Mover. The Creator. The Almighty. The Father. The King of Kings. Shepherd. Potter. Lawgiver. Judge. Mother. Lover. Breath.
The vehicle by which we are moved in passionate spirituality is metaphor. The mechanism of such metaphor is bodily. It is a neural mechanism that recruits our abilities to perceive, to move, to feel, and to envision in the service not only of theoretical and philosophical thought, but of spiritual experience. — George Lakoff

This force is unlimited. It is always moving and always flowing. The ancient Hawaiians, the Kahunas, used the metaphor of the flow of a running stream to represent the divine force. — Wayne Dyer

We live in a real world. Come back to it. — Natalie Portman

The traditional metaphor for a spiritual investigation is that of the voyage or the journey. From this image I must dissociate myself. I do not consider myself a voyager, I have preferred to stand still. — Susan Sontag

I had come to the conclusion that everyone took sex far too seriously. I mean, it's only sex. — Chloe Thurlow