From the Pope to the Dalai Lama, we’ve gathered every quote we’ve ever posted regarding spirituality. Enjoy and be sure to add any quotes/proverbs/holy scriptures you think we’ve missed in the comments!
“The truth is like a lion; you don’t have to defend it. Let it loose; it will defend itself.”
St. Augustine
“Everyone – pantheist, atheist, skeptic, polytheist – has to answer these questions: ‘Where did I come from? What is life’s meaning? How do I define right from wrong and what happens to me when I die?’ Those are the fulcrum points of our existence.”
Ravi Zacharias
“If you hate a person, then you’re defeated by them.”
Confucius
“A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.”
Greek Proverb
“If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.”
Mother Teresa
“It is in pardoning that we are pardoned.”
St. Francis of Assisi
“In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; in all things, charity.”
St. Augustine
“The real hero doesn’t say that he is one.”
Filipino Proverb
“This is therefore to say that the transformation of human consciousness through meditation is frustrated so long as we think of it as something that I by myself can bring about, by some sort of wangle, by some sort of gimmick. Because, you see, it leads to endless games of spiritual one-up-man-ship. And of guru competition. Of my guru being more effective than your guru. My yogas are faster than your yoga. I am more aware of myself than you are. I am humbler than you are. I am sorrier for my sins than you are. I love you more than you love me. There’s this interminable goings on where people fight and wonder whether they are a bit more evolved than somebody else and so on . . . All that can just fall away. And then we get this strange feeling that we’ve never had in our lives except occasionally by accident. Some people get a glimpse that we are no longer this poor little stranger and afraid in a world it never made. But that you are this universe. And you are creating it at every moment.”
Alan Watts
“If you love a flower, don’t pick it up. Because if you pick it up it dies and it ceases to be what you love. So if you love a flower, let it be. Love is not about possession. Love is about appreciation.”
Osho
“Do you wish to rise? Begin by descending. You plan a tower that will pierce the clouds? Lay first the foundation of humility.”
St. Augustine
“This, then, is the human problem: there is a price to be paid for every increase in consciousness. We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain.”
Alan Watts
“Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time. The mind that responds to the intellectual and spiritual values that lie hidden in a poem, a painting, or a piece of music, discovers a spiritual vitality that lifts it above itself, takes it out of itself, and makes it present to itself on a level of being that it did not know it could ever achieve.”
Thomas Merton
“The less people know, the more stubbornly they know it.”
Osho
“If you are suffering from a bad man’s injustice, forgive him lest there be two bad men.”
St. Augustine
“Questions come with a bag of assumptions.”
Ravi Zacharias
“If you spend enough time reading or writing, you find a voice, but you also find certain tastes. You find certain writers who when they write, it makes your own brain voice like a tuning fork, and you just resonate with them. And when that happens, reading those writers—not all of whom are modern . . . I mean, if you are willing to make allowances for the way English has changed, you can go way, way back with this— becomes a source of unbelievable joy. It’s like eating candy for the soul. So probably the smart thing to say is that lucky people develop a relationship with a certain kind of art that becomes spiritual, almost religious, and doesn’t mean, you know, church stuff, but it means you’re just never the same.”
David Foster Wallace
“A good deed dies when it is spoken about.”
Arab Proverb
“Humility is the mother of all virtues; purity, charity and obedience. It is in being humble that our love becomes real, devoted and ardent. If you are humble nothing will touch you, neither praise nor disgrace, because you know what you are. If you are blamed you will not be discouraged. If they call you a saint you will not put yourself on a pedestal.”
Mother Teresa
“When there is no enemy within, the enemy outside can do you no harm.”
African Proverb
“If you worship money and things — if they are where you tap real meaning in life — then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already — it’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power — you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart — you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.”
David Foster Wallace
“The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.”
Chinese Proverb
“We are all just walking each other home.”
Ram Dass
“No one can grow if he does not accept his smallness.”
Pope Francis
“The cure for pain is in the pain.”
Rumi
“Today it is fashionable to talk about the poor. Unfortunately, it is not fashionable to talk with them.”
Mother Teresa
“Abstinence is easier than perfect moderation.”
St. Augustine
“Man! Because he sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health. And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present; the result being that he does not live in the present or the future; he lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived.”
The Dalai Lama
“Better to light one small candle than to curse the darkness.”
Chinese Proverb
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