Spiritual Quest Quotes & Sayings

We were just sitting there talking when Peter Maurin came in.
We were just sitting there talking when lines of people began to form saying, "We need bread." ... If there were six small loaves and a few fishes, we had to divide them. There was always bread.
We were just sitting there talking and people moved in on us. Let those who can take it, take it. Some moved out and that made room for more. And somehow the walls were expanded.
We were just sitting there talking and someone said, "Let's all go live on a farm."
It was as casual as all that, I often think. It just came about. It just happened. — Dorothy Day

Acting is a spiritual quest to touch human beings. — Larry Moss

While they could appreciate the artistry of the dancers and musicians, they were not carried away by the pleasures they offered. They had their own dreams - to find answers concerning the spiritual quest and the renewal of society. — Thich Nhat Hanh

The urge to explore has propelled evolution since the first water creatures reconnoitered the land. Like all living systems, cultures cannot remain static; they evolve or decline. They explore or expire ... Beyond all rationales, space flight is a spiritual quest in the broadest sense, one promising a revitalization of humanity and a rebirth of hope no less profound than the great opening out of mind and spirit at the dawn of our modern age. — Buzz Aldrin

The quest for this unwearied inner peace is constant and universal. Probe deeply into the teachings of Buddha, Maimonides, or a Kempis, and you will discover that they base their diverse doctrines on the foundations of a large spiritual serenity. Analyze the prayers of troubled, overborne mankind of all creeds, in every age - and their petitions come down to the irreducible common denominators of daily bread and inward peace. Grown men do not pray for vain trifles. When they lift up their hearts and voices in this valley of tears they ask for strength and courage and understanding. — Joshua Loth Liebman

If you are serious about your religion, if you really wish to commit yourself to the spiritual quest, you must learn how to use psychochemicals. Drugs are the religion of the twenty-first
century. Pursuing the religious life today without using psychedelic drugs is like studying astronomy with the naked eye because that's how they did it in the first century A.D., and besides
telescopes are unnatural. — Timothy Leary

Once you get to this place on what we might metaphorically call your spiritual quest, once you get to the place where you hear about psychedelics, the issue is no longer then about where is the gas peddle on the spiritual vehicle. The issue suddenly becomes, where is the brake? Because this is the fuel to go where you want to go. This is the power to lift you where you want to be lifted. — Terence McKenna

All our surest statements about the nature of the world are mathematical statements, yet we do not know what mathematics "is" ... and so we find that we have adapted a religion strikingly similar to many traditional faiths. Change "mathematics" to "God" and little else might seem to change. The problem of human contact with some spiritual realm, of timelessness, of our inability to capture all with language and symbol-all have their counterparts in the quest for the nature of Platonic mathematics. — John D. Barrow

The object of their desire, the "essential" core of life, is something called authenticity, and finding the authentic has become the foremost spiritual quest of our time. It is a quest fraught with difficulty, as it takes place at the intersection of some of our culture's most controversial issues, including environmentalism and the market economy, personal identity and the consumer culture, and artistic expression and the meaning of life. — Andrew Potter

The intellectual quest, though fine as pearl or coral, is not the spiritual search. That spiritual search is on another level. Spiritual wine is a different substance. — Rumi

Writing is not a literary act but spiritual. And pastoring is not managing a religious business but a spiritual quest. — Eugene H. Peterson

I will only ever be drawn to people who suffer from that special and fertile anguish called self-doubt, or the thirst for the ideal, and desire for the soul's mystical fire. Self-satisfaction because of some material accomplishment will never be for me. The truly great are those who quest for better spiritual selves. — Isabelle Eberhardt

Our life consists not in the pursuit of material success but in the quest for worthy spiritual growth. Our entire earthly existence is but a transitional stage in the movement toward something higher, and we must not stumble and fall, nor must we linger fruitlessly on one rung of the ladder. Material laws alone do not explain our life or give it direction. The laws of physics and physiology will never reveal the indisputable manner in which the Creator constantly, day in and day out, participates in the life of each of us, unfailingly granting us the energy of existence; when this assistance leaves us, we die. And in the life of our entire planet, the Divine Spirit surely moves with no less force: this we must grasp in our dark and terrible hour. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Our human quest is to survive; our spiritual quest is to unite. — Asa Don Brown

When people get into therapy, or when they need healing, their real hope is that they'll come to the secret frontier in themselves, some unknown source of energy and healing in themselves, where the divinity of who-ness is protected. This is a spiritual quest. — John O'Donohue

The spiritual quest was always the predominant aspect of my life. It's always been there. But there's also an incredible passion connected to it; it's not just a dry investigative process. I have been extremely emotional about it, and that comes out in the songs. — Cat Stevens

The people who shape our lives and our cultures have the ability to communicate a vision or a quest or a joy or a mission. — Tony Robbins

Religious tolerance has developed more as a consequence of the impotence of religions to impose their dogmas on each other than as a consequence of spiritual humility in the quest for understanding first and last things. — Sidney Hook

Always remember, joy is not incidental to spiritual quest. It is vital. — Nachman Of Breslov

Coaching is about, "How do I get people to play at their peak level?" It is a spiritual quest. And if it's not that, you don't have a challenge, you don't have a mission. Forming a brotherhood and trying to move it forward - that's what coaching is. — Phil Jackson

In wishing to know ourselves fully, we must forget our quest for gain and seek only completion. At a certain point in our development, we no longer even seek to become Mystic, Magister, Sorcerer, or Witch: we seek only our own perfection in the wholeness of our Will, in the joining of light with dark and strength with love. We are varied and gorgeous yet pure of heart. Our aim is this: to know ourselves and to know the world. — T. Thorn Coyle

These are the stories of travelers on a spiritual quest between worlds. Part mythmaker, part poet, Omar Castaeda is an original, and these stories are unlike any in our literature. — Toi Derricotte

Spiritual seekers particularly are on a quest to understand life; we want to examine our own lives and find meaning in what we do and who we are ... We find meaning in the seeking itself. Every step along the way is the Way ... — Surya Das

I believe in kindness and niceness and lots of spiritual things, but the real intellectual rigor and quest of logic is something that I'm afraid takes incredibly hard work and we live in an age in which hard work is if not actively deprecated or denigrated it is run away from or ignored. — Stephen Fry

Spiritual perception must be an individual quest or it has no meaning. We are greatly influenced by our own immediate reality, and we can act on that reality one step at a time without the necessity of seeing too far into the distance. Even steps in the wrong direction give us insight into the many paths designed to teach us. To bring the soul Self into harmony with our physical environment, we are given freedom of choice to exercise free will in the search for the reasons why we are here. On the road of life we must take responsibility for all our decisions without blaming other people for life's setbacks that bring unhappiness. — Michael Newton

Our Egos constantly strive to destroy our pure joy and happiness."

"If you say that you would love to do something, it is your responsibility to make it happen."

"Whether you like it or not you are on a spiritual quest; it is just a matter of which path you choose to take"

"Spirituality is very simple; you must unlearn all the faulty knowledge acquired from society"

" We must return to the wonder and mystery of childhood to be genuinely enlightened." (Came to me when staring into my sons eyes)

" Look into an infants eyes and you will see the true nature of life"

" Death is inevitable, but life is optional. — Richard A. Singer Jr.

Your intuition won't fail you, the quest dear; is to silence your mind so you can feel your way home. — Nikki Rowe

As pilgrims we effectively slip into the role of our spiritual ancestress and run back and forth between the hills seven times. This symbolises our own quest in this world for whatever we are seeking and God's Mercy which fulfils our quest even beyond our expectations. — Kristiane Backer

Purify your life by keeping the commandments. This will help you qualify for the Spirit, who will assist you in your quest. — Ann M. Dibb

I consider myself a student of many religions. The more I learn, the more questions I have. For me, the spiritual quest will be a life-long work in progress. — Dan Brown

God is the most obvious thing in the world. He is absolutely self-evident - the simplest, clearest and closest reality of life and consciousness. We are only unaware of him because we are too complicated, for our vision is darkened by the complexity of pride. We seek him beyond the horizon with our noses lifted high in the air, and fail to see that he lies at our very feet. We flatter ourselves in premeditating the long, long journey we are going to take in order to find him, the giddy heights of spiritual progress we are going to scale, and all the time are unaware of the truth that "God is nearer to us than we are to ourselves." We are like birds flying in quest of the air, or men with lighted candles searching through the darkness for fire. — Alan W. Watts

Spiritual grace adds to a life and it is crucial ingredient in any person's quest to attain self-realization. — Kilroy J. Oldster

I ended up spending years on a spiritual quest - diving into the world's great spiritual traditions. — Brandon Bays

You and I, in our quest for truth, must set ourselves on a higher level. If the worldly reasoner
is like a butcher, we wish not to be found like them - minus fingers or thumbs. Spiritual reasoning
can be a very sharp blade; it behooves us, then, to 'rightly divide'. — D.L. Herring

Beware of 'god men' and 'god women'. Even people who have not been depressed for a day in their lives get sucked into the seductive delusion of spirituality. If you must seek, seek by yourself, sitting in an armchair at your desk after office hours. For while Buddha saw the light, we do not know how many of his disciples did. If you must get guidance from a living guru, take it and move on. Gurus are no more than the teachers we had at school. You may find them when you need to learn, but you have to outgrow them in order to grow. — Indu Muralidharan

Contact with the sacred occurs in the stillness of the heart and mind. If there is any real destination to the spiritual quest, it is this point of silence, the middle of the spiral, the center of the self ... The only map that does the spiritual traveler any good is one that leads to the center. — Christina Baldwin

Looking at the world today, we might easily forget that the main purpose of our life - you could call it the heart of being human - is to be happy. All of us share the same wish, and the same right, to seek happiness and avoid suffering. Even following a spiritual path, or the religious life, is a quest for happiness. — Sogyal Rinpoche

The prophecy, "The Revelation of Christ" is about mankind's journey into a darker reality and then our quest to create a light based reality. We can only create a light based reality when we have re-created our collective spirit to make it strong enough to hold light. — Phoenix

The spiritual quest begins, for most people, as a search for meaning. — Marilyn Ferguson

The worst danger of the mystic is as always a quest of spiritual privilege leading to aloofness from the common lot. — Vida Dutton Scudder

The process of gathering spiritual light is the quest of a lifetime. — Dieter F. Uchtdorf

In 1991, my father passed away and I went on a spiritual quest. It was a light one, not too terribly deep because I'm not terribly deep, and neither was my father. — Mike Myers

I believe that communism is another sad, bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages even now are being written. I believe this because the source of our strength in the quest for human freedom is not material, but spiritual. And because it knows no limitation, it must terrify and ultimately triumph over those who would enslave their fellow men. — Ronald Reagan

C. S. Lewis wrote that "sooner or later [God] withdraws, if not in fact, at least from their conscious experience, all those supports and incentives. He leaves the creature to stand up on its own legs. . . It is during such trough periods, much more than during the peak periods, that it is growing into the sort of creature He wants it to be." This is because "He wants servants who can finally become sons [and daughters]."22 That may simply be, unavoidably, a wrenching process of spiritual abandonment such as Eve and Adam felt in their expulsion from God's presence, or we all must have felt upon leaving of our premortal estate. Perhaps this feeling of desolation was entailed in Joseph's remark that in our quest for understanding, we "must search into and contemplate the darkest abyss."23 Perhaps many of us will never find God by calling out His name at the entrance to the cave; we must enter its depths. — Terryl L. Givens

The journey of the hero is about the courage to seek the depths; the image of creative rebirth; the eternal cycle of change within us; the uncanny discovery that the seeker is the mystery which the seeker seeks to know. The hero journey is a symbol that binds, in the original sense of the word, two distant ideas, the spiritual quest of the ancients with the modern search for identity, always the one, shape-shifting yet marvelously constant story that we find. — Phil Cousineau

The artist's quest is to succeed in combining and balancing all compositional attributes and physical elements into those that are purely spiritual. That is the secret of art. — Edward J. Fraughton

Violence, whether spiritual or physical, is a quest for identity and the meaningful. The less identity, the more violence. — Marshall McLuhan

Seeking the Cave is part travelogue, part literary history, and part spiritual journey. James Lenfestey is a lively and entertaining tour guide. Modest, funny, curious, and wide open to the world, he gives us perceptive glimpses of Chinese culture, ancient to contemporary, and into what it means to be a poet, both now and twelve centuries ago. The account of his quest to find Han Shan's cave is a delight from beginning to end. — Chase Twichell

I've been on a quest for spiritual answers for a long time. The things I've learned about interconnectedness and non-duality and the feeling of tapping into your soul that goes beyond the edge of your skin is important to me. Once I learned that, I'm far less often trapped in my own little man problems. Me against the universe problems. — Jim Carrey

The spiritual quest is a journey without distance. You travel from where you are right now To where you have always been. From ignorance to recognition ... — Anthony De Mello

Their common denominator of humanism could not be reconciled with the Biblical view of man's depravity after the Fall and his need of salvation. Too late, many ministers began to see that hippie non-conformity with, and rejection of, the world was hardly the same as that high spiritual quest advocated by the Apostle Paul. — Bob Larson

We're moving faster with our science and technology than our morals are evolving, we're going to have to live in the future we create so it is up to us to become responsible for what we're creating. It is the only way to avoid the probable catastrophes that will face us and our children on the way. We all have to get on the same page if we're to unify and a species and survive. I hope 'The Vision Quest' will help people set positive intentions for their lives and the world we live in, as well as give them some tools to manifest them — Deborah M. Pratt

When we approach the journey acknowledging what we do not know and what we can't control, we maintain our energy for the quest. — Sharon Salzberg

For the Puritans, the God-centered life meant making the quest for spiritual and moral holiness the great business of life. — Leland Ryken

The intellectual quest is exquisite like pearls and coral, But it is not the same as the spiritual quest. The spiritual quest is on another level altogether, Spiritual wine has a subtler taste. The intellect and the senses investigate cause and effect. The spiritual seeker surrenders to the wonder. — Rumi

Omens are a language, it's the alphabet we develop to speak to the world's soul, or the universe's, or God's, whatever name you want to give it. Like an alphabet, it is individual, you only learn it by making mistakes, and that keeps you from globalizing the spiritual quest. — Paulo Coelho

The spiritual quest is not some added benefit to our life, something you embark on if you have the time and inclination. We are spiritual beings on an earthly journey. Our spirituality makes up our beingness. — John Bradshaw

People who are on a spiritual quest don't think, they simply want results. — Paulo Coelho

The very best antidote for the New Age teachings is for Christians to enter into and live fully in the supernatural. This is certainly no time to draw back from supernatural living and retreat into a mere defense of orthodoxy. Because we have adopted this stance for the last half-century, we have opened the door for the New Age to fill the vacuum. There is a longing in the human heart for communication and a relationship with the Divine. Since the dawn of history, when God's people do not preach, proclaim, and model the genuine article, men and women will wander into whatever appears to offer the fulfillment of their spiritual quest. We need to cast aside our hesitation and proceed strongly forward, the Word and the Spirit as our unfailing guide. — Mark Virkler