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Spiritual Quotes Homepage
Spiritual Quotes To Uplift, Inspire & Deepen
Your Connection To Spirit - Page 1
Commentary © 2007-2008  Richard Chandler & Bonnett Chandler

                         

Horst M. Rechelbacher, founder of Aveda, an organic plant-based line of salon products, is an active environmentalist, innovative business leader, author, artist, yoga practitioner and the founder and chief executive of the Minneapolis based company, ‘Intelligent Nutrients’. 

More of Horst Rechelbacher's biography and quotes here

“It’s important to let go, calm down, and get grounded. We need to listen to ourselves. When one becomes aware that our present-moment thoughts are not productive, one should simply let them go. Change a negative thought to a positive one.”

“Close your eyes and you will see clearly. Be still and you will hear the truth.”

“Serve selflessly, seeing our customers as ourselves.”
“Apprentice ourselves with dedication to great teachers and to life itself.”

Shirley MacLaine

Shirley MacLaine is an Academy Award winning actress and author. She started out in ballet in grade school and jr. high, and primarily danced in men’s roles, as she was the tall one in ballet class. Due to injuries, and not having the petit body that is coveted by the ballet world for its female stars, she switched to acting while in high school.  She had great success as an actress, moving to Hollywood under contract with Paramount films.

She later sued Paramount and won in a famous actor’s contract case that put an end to the old Hollywood way, where the studio basically owned the career of its actors.  An energetic, high-octane performer, MacLaine has endeared herself to audiences worldwide. She is also outspoken - whether it be about politics, film, or spirituality, most particularly, her belief in reincarnation. Her current interest in spirituality is evidenced in her own website, which is a new age one, with information on chakras, meditation, the spiritual path and body, mind and spirit resources.

“It is useless to hold a person to anything he says while he’s in love, drunk, or running for office.”

                  

“A person who knows how to laugh at himself will never cease to be amused.”

“I don’t need anyone to rectify my existence. The most profound relationship we will ever have is the one with ourselves.”

“I realized that if what we call human nature can be changed, then absolutely anything is possible. And from that moment, my life changed.”

- Shirley MacLaine (1934- )

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Martin Luther King Jr.

One of the main leaders of the American civil rights movement, Martin Luther King Jr. organized and led marches for blacks' right to vote, desegregation, labor rights and other basic civil rights. A Baptist minister by training, King became an activist early in his career, leading the Montgomery Bus Boycott and helping to found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Taking inspiration from Mahatma Gandhi, King utilized nonviolent civil disobedience to raise consciousness. Between 1957 and 1968, King traveled over six million miles and spoke over twenty-five hundred times, providing what he called a coalition of conscience and inspiring his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”, a manifesto of the black revolution. He planned the drives in Alabama for the registration of African-Americans as voters and his monumental 1963 March on Washington, DC in which Dr. King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech, electrifying the crowd.

This speech is regarded, along with Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, as one of the finest speeches in the history of American oratory.  King conferred with President John F. Kennedy and campaigned for President Lyndon B. Johnson. He was named Man of the Year by Time magazine in 1963, and became not only the symbolic leader of American blacks but also a world figure. In 1964, King became the youngest person to receive the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to end segregation and racial discrimination through civil disobedience and other non-violent means. On the evening of April 4, 1968, while standing on the balcony of his motel room in Memphis, Tennessee, where he was to lead a protest march in sympathy with striking garbage workers of that city, he was assassinated. He was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Jimmy Carter in 1977. Martin Luther King Day was established as a national holiday in the United States in 1986. In 2004, King was posthumously awarded a Congressional Gold Medal.

“If physical death is the price that I must pay to free my white brothers and sisters from a permanent death of the spirit, then nothing can be more redemptive.”

“Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.”

“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”

            

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”

“Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.”

“We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.”

“I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over, and I’ve seen the Promised Land.”

“I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. That is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.”

We must combine the toughness of the serpent and the softness of the dove, a tough mind and a tender heart.”

- Martin Luther King Jr.  (1929-1968)

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Ram Dass

Author of the 1971 bestseller Be Here Now, Dr. Richard Alpert, (also known as Ram Dass), is a contemporary spiritual teacher who is dedicated to promoting spiritual growth and awareness. While at Harvard, Alpert’s explorations of human consciousness led him, in collaboration with Timothy Leary, Aldous Huxley, Allen Ginsberg, Ken Kesey, and others, to pursue intensive research with psilocybin, LSD-25, and other psychedelic chemicals. Alpert eventually split from this group and increasingly found his purpose in the Hindu ethic of serving others. He traveled to India where he met his spiritual teacher, the Maharaj-ji, who gave him the name “Ram Dass,” which means “servant of God”.

These life-changing experiences in India inspired him to write about contemporary spirituality and when he returned to the United States in 1969, he embraced a wide variety of spiritual traditions and practices, including yoga, meditation in various schools of Buddhism, Sufi and Jewish studies.

In February 1997, he suffered a stroke, which left him with expressive aphasia. He has said that his stroke was an act of grace and he continues to travel and teach about the nature of consciousness, and about service as a spiritual path, as his health permits. When asked if he could sum up his life’s message Ram Dass replied, “I help people as a way to work on myself, and I work on myself to help people... To me, that’s what the emerging game is all about.” 

“I would say that the thrust of my life has been initially about getting free, and then realizing that my freedom is not independent of everybody else. Then I am arriving at that circle where one works on oneself as a gift to other people so that one doesn’t create more suffering. I help people as a work on myself and I work on myself to help people.”

“Be here now.”

“The stroke caused me to lose faith, and it was a cold, cold place, and I suddenly realized it was fierce grace… that turned my life around.”

“Everything in your life is there as a vehicle for your transformation. Use it!”

           

“I am embarrassed to admit what drew me to psychology. I didn’t want to go to medical school. I was getting good grades in psychology and I was charismatic and people in the psychology department liked me. It was as low a level as that.”

“We are all affecting the world every moment, whether we mean to or not. Our actions and states of mind matter, because we are so deeply interconnected with one another.”

“The spiritual journey is individual, highly personal. It can’t be organized or regulated. It isn’t true that everyone should follow one path. Listen to your own truth.”

“The most exquisite paradox… as soon as you give it all up, you can have it all. As long as you want power, you can’t have it. The minute you don’t want power, you’ll have more than you ever dreamed possible.”

“It is important to expect nothing, to take every experience, including the negative ones, as merely steps on the path, and to proceed.”

“Be patient. You’ll know when it’s time for you to wake up and move ahead.”

“Suffering is the sandpaper of our incarnation. It does its work of shaping us.”

“It is up to the most conscious member of the relationship to create the space for the relationship to grow.”

“Spiritual practices help us move from identifying with the ego to identifying with the soul. Old age does that for you too. It spiritualizes people naturally.”

“The dance goes from realizing that you’re separate (which is the awakening) to then trying to find your way back into the totality of which you are not only a part, but which you are.”

“Healing does not mean going back to the way things were before, but rather allowing what is now to move us closer to God.”

“As long as you have certain desires about how it ought to be you can’t see how it is.”

“The resistance to the unpleasant situation is the root of suffering.”

“There’s much more in any given moment than we usually perceive, and that we ourselves are much more than we usually perceive. When you know that, part of you can stand outside the drama of your life.”

“When you are forced to bear the unbearable something dies in you.
What dies in you is whom you thought you were that couldn’t bear the unbearable.”

- Ram Dass  (1931- )

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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The Russian author and historian, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has written a number of major novels based on his own experience of Soviet prisons, the most famous being The Gulag Archipelago (1973-1978). Descended from an intellectual Cossack family, he was serving in the East Prussian military when he was arrested for criticizing Joseph Stalin in private correspondence with a friend and sentenced to an eight-year term in a labor camp. He was imprisoned from 1945 to 1953, followed by permanent internal exile. Through his writings, he made the world aware of the Gulag, the Soviet labor camp system, and, for these efforts, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970.  He was exiled from the Soviet Union in 1974 but returned in 1994 and now lives with his wife, Natalia in Moscow. He has continued to criticize western materialism and Russian bureaucracy and secularization.  Solzhenitsyn is the oldest living Nobel laureate in literature.
 

“Do not pursue what is illusory - property and position: all that is gained at the expense of your nerves decade after decade and can be confiscated in one fell night. Live with a steady superiority over life – don’t be afraid of misfortune, and do not yearn after happiness; it is after all, all the same: the bitter doesn’t last forever, and the sweet never fills the cup to overflowing.”

“Not everything has a name. Some things lead us into a realm beyond words.”

“When truth is discovered by someone else, it loses something of its attractiveness.”

“Blow the dust off the clock. Your watches are behind the times. Throw open the heavy curtains which are so dear to you- you do not even suspect that the day has already dawned outside.”

“It is the artist who realizes that there is a supreme force above him and works gladly away as a small apprentice under God’s heaven.”

“Of course God is endlessly multi-dimensional so every religion that exists on earth represents some face, some side of God.”

“Our envy of others devours us most of all.”

- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn  (1918- )

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Reinhold Niebuhr

Reinhold Niebuhr was a Protestant theologian best known for his study of the task of relating the Christian faith to the reality of modern politics and diplomacy. He thought of himself as a preacher and social activist, but the influence of his theological thought on the field of social ethics and on society made him a significant intellectual figure. As minister of Bethel Evangelical Church in Detroit in 1915, he personally witnessed the working-class realities of American automobile industry laborers. His criticisms of the inhumane treatment of factory employees in the Ford Motor Company plants made him an outspoken advocate for the rights of workers in social and economic matters. He was also an outspoken critic of the Ku Klux Klan, which he concluded was “one of the worst specific social phenomena which the religious pride of peoples has ever developed.”  From 1920 until his retirement in 1968, he taught applied Christianity (later Ethics and Theology) at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. During his lifetime, Niebuhr was the best-known Christian intellectual in the United States. A prolific writer as well as a popular, engaging speaker, Niebuhr became a national celebrity and influenced Martin Luther King, Jr. and policy makers in the administration of President John Kennedy. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964.

“I think there ought to be a club in which preachers and journalists could come together and have the sentimentalism of the one matched with the cynicism of the other. That ought to bring them pretty close to the truth.”

“Real religion produces the spirit of humility and repentance. It destroys moral conceit.”

“Humor is a prelude to faith and laughter is the beginning of prayer.”

                  

“The final wisdom of life requires not the annulment of incongruity but the achievement of serenity within and above it.”

“The tendency to claim God as an ally for our partisan value and ends is the source of all religious fanaticism.”

“A wise architect observed that you could break the laws of architectural art provided you had mastered them first. That would apply to religion as well as to art. Ignorance of the past does not guarantee freedom from its imperfections.”

“Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime,
Therefore, we are saved by hope.
Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history;
Therefore, we are saved by faith.
Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone.
Therefore, we are saved by love.
No virtuous act is quite a virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own;
Therefore, we are saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.”

- Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971)

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