Spiritual Teaching Quotes

A spiritual teaching is a finger pointing toward Reality; it is not Reality itself. To be in a true and mature relationship with a spiritual teaching requires you to apply it, not simply believe in it. Belief leads to various forms of fundamentalism and shuts down the curiosity and inquiry that are essential to open the way for awakening and what lies beyond awakening. A good spiritual teaching is something that you work with and apply. In doing so, it works on you (often in a hidden way) and helps reveal to you the Truth (and falseness) that lies within you. ~ Adyashanti

It is part of the amazing originality of Christ that there is to be found in his teaching no word whatever which suggests a difference in the spiritual ideals, the spheres, or the potentialities of men and women. ~ Maude Royden

For hundreds of years the world was wrapped in a veil of spiritual darkness, until there was not one fundamental truth belonging to the place of salvation ... Joseph Smith declared that in the year 1820 the Lord revealed to him that all the 'Christian' churches were in error, teaching for commandments the doctrines of men. ~ Joseph Fielding Smith

Often suffering is the trigger, or a spiritual teaching, or both. Call it readiness, or grace. This is the beginning of the awakening process. ~ Eckhart Tolle

Every spiritual teaching points to the possibility of the end of suffering - Now. It is true that most teachers have had to go through the "Dark Night of the Soul," although for one or two it was very, very quick. ~ Eckhart Tolle

My sangha, what I seem to attract, are people who have been practicing a long time, they're teaching, they're more serious about their spiritual journey. ~ Beryl Bender Birch

I went to Catholic school for 12 years and went to church every Sunday. I may not do that anymore but I think it gave me a good basis. I've also explored things on my own different philosophies and spiritual teachings and I use what works for me. ~ Jennifer Lopez

Many people think that it is the function of a spiritual teaching to provide answers to life's biggest questions,
but actually, the opposite is true.
The primary task of any good spiritual teaching is not to
answer your questions, but to question your answers. ~ Adyashanti

You know, in America, Christian fundamentalism vs. science. You know, be it teaching Darwinian evolutionary theory or stem cell res- You know, the whole thing, and then the issue of women being educated in Middle Eastern - I mean, it just seems so contemporary. In terms of spirituality, it's interesting because I actually think (her character in Agora) Hypatia is very spiritual. ~ Rachel Weisz

I think science and spirituality are one and the same, I don't think they're really different ... quantum physics is validating all kinds of spiritual teachings. ~ Jennifer Beals

You know, our fundamentalist friends dislike the teaching of evolution in schools because of the effect they feel it has on our view of our own special importance, while liberals insist that scientific and spiritual matters can be kept in separate compartments. On this point, I tend to agree with the fundamentalists, though I come to opposite conclusions about teaching evolution because I am convinced it's true. ~ Steven Weinberg

Once the awakening happens, with it comes the realization that suffering is unnecessary now. You have reached the end of suffering because you have transcended the world. It is the place that is free of suffering. This seems to be everybody's path. Perhaps it is not everybody's path in this lifetime, but it seems to be a universal path. Even without a spiritual teaching or a spiritual teacher, I believe that everybody would get there eventually. But that could take time. ~ Eckhart Tolle

Some form of suffering often brings about a readiness. One can say it cracks open the shell of the egoic mind with which many people identify as "me." Life cracks open that shell, and once that crack is there, then we are reached more easily by spiritual teaching. ~ Eckhart Tolle

I've never seen service as separate from my spiritual practice or my spiritual teaching. ~ Marianne Williamson

Gardening can become a spiritual exercise, teaching us discernment as we eliminate the weeds from our lives, giving what we value room to grow. ~ Diane Dreher

So I went off on my own and started the process of spiritual teaching. ~ Frederick Lenz

How can we give if there is nothing there? ... Support and understanding cannot come from the emotionally starved. Teaching cannot come from the unlearned. And most important of all, spiritual guidance cannot come from the spiritually weak. ~ Marion G. Romney

When I came to the West, I realized there was much hunger for spiritual teachings, but no environment for spirituality. ~ Sogyal Rinpoche

No matter what I write or speak about, it always has some connection to how our spiritual understanding impacts the world we live in. Whether I'm writing or teaching about nutrition, pilates, green living or meditation, all topics simmer down to self thought and intention. ~ Marianne Williamson

The words of the Lord are found in the scriptures and the teachings of the apostles and prophets. They provide us counsel and direction that, when followed, will act like a spiritual life jacket and will help us know how to hold on with both hands. ~ M. Russell Ballard

Great spiritual teachings do not change, but we do. As we grow older and wiser, we can receive the teachings at deeper levels. ~ Marianne Williamson

Spiritual learners too slowly graduate like students of normal education. If you are mentally elevated, you can grasp and appreciate complex teachings. ~ Girdhar Joshi

Meaning can only be understood in relation to its environment. Therefore, the words only make full sense in context ... There are no absolutes, there is no meaning without relationships, everything is not only interacting but interdependent. The kahunas use this idea to help give a person a powerfully secure sense of significance, while at the same time teaching him that to heal himself is to heal the world, and to heal the world is to heal himself. This is not a loss of individuality, but an understanding that individuality itself is a relationship with the environment. ~ Serge King

Try to say that: "I don't know anything". We used to call it "tabula rasa" in Latin. Maybe you could think of yourself as an erased blackboard, ready to be written on. For by and large, what blocks spiritual teaching is the assumption that we already know, or that we don't need to know. We have to pray for the grace of beginner's mind. We need to say with the blind man, "I want to see". ~ Richard Rohr

Christ was the first feminist and because of that I've learned from his teaching to call myself a Christian feminist, adding that her faith is not a matter of traditions and dogmas but, rather, a spiritual experience. ~ Jane Fonda

Managing the power of choice, with all its creative and spiritual implications, is the essence of the human experience. All spiritual teachings are directed toward inspiring us to recognize that the power to make choices is the dynamic that converts our spirits into matter, our words into flesh. Choice is the process of creation itself. ~ Caroline Myss

If the only teacher you have is your suffering, you will need a substantial dose of it for the ego to dissolve. But if the power of spiritual teaching is already at work, then a minor event can dissolve the ego. ~ Eckhart Tolle

Spiritual teaching must always be by symbols. ~ Mary Baker Eddy

Buddhas continue to live on through their teachings as dharma bodies. Their spirits become manifest in the sangha (spiritual community) where their teachings are passed on. ~ Shinjo Ito

If broken lives and souls are to be healed, it must begin with teaching the practice of the presence ... To abide in the presence of the Lord is to begin to hear Him. To follow through on that hearing is to find healing, self-acceptance, and growth into psychological and spiritual balance and maturity. ~ Leanne Payne

Aloneness is a wise teacher. Kierkegaard remarked that one sign of spiritual maturity was the ability to be comfortable when alone. ~ Vernon Howard

My encounter with desperation while witnessing the death of a precious child changed me, teaching me that although we will have sad times, we can move on, chastened and changed but resilient and hopeful. Laurel showed me one way to live with hope as well as cancer as she thrived even when tumors grew within her small body. She exhibited how a child can push aside despair and appreciate as many moments as possible, to believe in the power of resurrection, both the human spirit and in a Biblical sense. ~ Brent Green

If religion, instead of being the manifestation of a spiritual ideal, gives prominence to scriptures and external rites, then does it disturb the peace more than anything else. ~ Rabindranath Tagore

Your life is shaped by the thoughts and experiences you choose - and make no mistake, the decision is always yours. I promise, when you learn to be conscious and in control of what you are focusing on, you can begin to create high vibrational experiences, which will transform and heal your life. ~ Susan Barbara Apollon

You never really know something until you teach it to someone else. ~ John C. Maxwell

It is not enough for a population or a section of the population to have Christian faith and be docile to the ministers of religion in order to be in a position properly to judge political matters. If this population has no political experience, no taste for seeing clearly for itself nor a tradition of initiative and critical judgment, its position with respect to politics grows more complicated, for nothing is easier for political counterfeiters than to exploit good principles for purposes of deception, and nothing is more disastrous than good principles badly applied. And moreover nothing is easier for human weakness than to merge religion with prejudices of race, family or class, collective hatreds, passions of a clan and political phantoms which compensate for the rigors of individual discipline in a pious but insufficiently purified soul. Politics deal with matters and interests of the world and they depend upon passions natural to man and upon reason. But the point I wish to make here is that without goodness, love and charity, all that is best in us - even divine faith, but passions and reason much more so - turns in our hands to an unhappy use. The point is that right political experience cannot develop in people unless passions and reason are oriented by a solid basis of collective virtues, by faith and honor and thirst for justice. The point is that, without the evangelical instinct and the spiritual potential of a living Christianity, political judgment and politic ~ Jacques Maritain

What is less often noticed is that it is precisely the kind of moral instruction that parents are constantly trying to give their children - concrete, imaginative, teaching general principles from particular instances, and seeking all the time to bring the children to appreciate and share the parent's own attitudes and view of life ... The all-embracing principles of conduct ~ J.I. Packer

How abundantly do spiritual beings display the powers that belong to them! We look for them, but do not see them; we listen to, but do not hear them; yet they enter into all things, and there is nothing without them. ~ Confucius

Had my parents allowed me, when I read a book, to pay a visit to the region it described, I should have felt that I was making an enormous advance towards the ultimate conquest of truth. For even if we have the sensation of being always enveloped in, surrounded by our own soul, still it does not seem a fixed and immovable prison; rather do we seem to be borne away with it, and perpetually struggling to transcend it, to break out into the world, with a perpetual discouragement as we hear endlessly all around us that unvarying sound which is not an echo from without, but the resonance of a vibration from within. We try to discover in things, which become precious to us on that account, the reflection of what our soul has projected on to them; we are disillusioned when we find that they are in reality devoid of the charm which they owed, in our minds, to the association of certain ideas; sometimes we mobilise all our spiritual forces in a glittering array in order to bring our influence to bear on other human beings who, we very well know, are situated outside ourselves where we can never reach them. ~ Marcel Proust

Once you have access to the source of creation within you, your health and wellbeing will naturally be taken care of. ~ Jaggi Vasudev

We Are All Capable of Great Things ~ Angie-Marie Delsante

Attraction is essentially your intuition assessing the situation before your conscious mind gets the chance to. Attraction is your subconscious picking up on subtle cues that it likes before your conscious mind understands exactly what it is it's liking. I find evidence for this in the fact that attraction is often described as a spiritual or psychic experience, as a meeting of the minds or a melding of hearts. Love at first sight. Instant connection. Attraction is simply a finger pointing toward potential closeness. ~ Kira Asatryan

Be consistent in your dedication to showing your gratitude to others. Gratitude is a fuel, a medicine, and spiritual and emotional nourishment. ~ Steve Maraboli

Act your age. Students do not look upon you as a buddy, pal, or peer. They expect you to be a mature adult ... Many young teachers have a tendency to seek popularity, resorting to tactics that can create endless problems. ~ Jim Brown

Revival is the spiritual resurrection of a person, congregation, region or nation that has lost its first love and grown cold to the passion and purpose that blazes in the heart of God. Revival is the rebirth of consecration and devotion in the lives of those who have grown complacent and have been compromised by a lifestyle that has become encumbered by the cares of this world. ~ Michael Brodeur

Although our body gets older, our spirit only experiences present time. So, the question is: Why can we remember the past but not predict the future? And the answer is related to our purpose as a spiritual being. If we knew the future, we could easily avoid responsibility and delay our spiritual development. ~ Daniel Marques

The test, the mark, of a person that's on a spiritual path is whether they can live in harmony. ~ Melody Beattie

Don't worry, eventually everything falls into its rightful place. ~ Fakeer Ishavardas

The attributes of God, though intelligible to us on their surface yet, for the very reason that they are infinite, transcend our comprehension, when they are dwelt upon, when they are followed out, and can only be received by faith. ~ John Henry Newman

I no longer think that learning how to manage people, especially subordinates, is the most important for executives to learn. I am teaching above all else, how to manage oneself. ~ Peter Drucker

In one life only had the fighting, the healing, the teaching, the praying, and the suffering held equal and perfect place, and that life could never on earth be lived again. For some dying men, he thought, there would have been comfort in the old belief that a soul comes back to earth again and again, the fighter returning to pray and the teacher to heal. Once he had half believed that himself, but now he could not. Once only had the perfect life been focused in a human body. He had not returned. Why should we? The Word now taught and healed, fought and suffered, through the yielded wills of other men. ~ Elizabeth Goudge

It follows, therefore, that the church's evangelism ought to be one in which all the counsel of God is made known to men. We need a recovery of belief in the converting and sanctifying power of the living Word of God in the teaching of the pulpit, and its ability to transform the lives of men and produce in them the lineaments and fruits of mature Christian character. ~ William Still

No one can hurt you without teaching a life's lesson. So accept it with love and kindness. ~ Debasish Mridha

Happiness is always on the other side of being teachable. ~ Shannon L. Alder

I began my education at a very early age; in fact, right after I left college. ~ Winston Churchill

We are inside this plasma,
and plasma is inside everything. It is incandescent
in the sun, and I am curious to know if you
are able to stop orbiting yourself around it even for a second.
No, you are not able to do this, but you are able
to stop the truths from being spoken.
All the absurd things are cool. Their spirits lose
their oxygen ions to generate
that matter in no pain. The spiritual things
are in pulsing metamorphosis to break into pieces, or
to turn back after
a hard but reversing process
before becoming anachronistic. ~ Marieta Maglas- Eschatological Regression

You can't have a physical transformation until you have a spiritual transformation. ~ Cory Booker

In love lies the seed of our growth. The more we love, the closer we are to the spiritual experience. ~ Paulo Coelho

I've always been a spiritual person who believed in a Higher Power. So, I've always had my 1-on-1 with God, even if I wasn't much of a religious person. ~ Ja Rule

There is a life behind the personality that uses personalities as masks. There are times when life puts off the mask and deep answers unto deep. ~ Dion Fortune

We are all the authors of our own fates; but we have gotten so lost in the technicalities of forming letters and stringing words together that we've forgotten what it really means to write. ~ Cristen Rodgers

As Stephen Jay Gould pointed out in Time, in no other Western country is the teaching of Evolution regarded as controversial. Throughout the world, one way or another, most Christian denominations have managed to reconcile belief in God with belief in the mechanisms of natural selection. A French or German or Scandinavian politician who called for students to entertain as a reasonable deduction from existing evidence the proposition that Earth is at most 10,000 years old would be bundled off to a mental hospital. ~ Katha Pollitt

Power is not something we should be afraid of. Power is great, power is energy. And in terms of energy, the most important energy is human spiritual energy and when I say spiritual, I feel like have to be very careful, I don't mean religious, I mean the energy of the mind, the energy that exists within us. ~ Yoko Ono

Free thought means fearless thought. It is not deterred by legal penalties, nor by spiritual consequences. Dissent from the Bible does not alarm the true investigator, who takes truth for authority not authority for truth. The thinker who is really free, is independent; he is under no dread; he yields to no menace; he is not dismayed by law, nor custom, nor pulpits, nor society-whose opinion appals so many. He who has the manly passion of free thought, has no fear of anything, save the fear of error. ~ George Holyoake