Quotes On Mythology, Spirituality, and Religion

  • In Christ, there is neither Jew nor Gentile, slave nor free man, male nor female.” [Galatians 3:28]
  • The Sun, with all the planets revolving around it, and depending upon it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as though it had nothing else in the Universe to do. (Galileo Galileo)
  • A reporter once asked Gandhi, “Do you have a message I can take back to people?” “Yes; my life is my message,” replied (Mahatma Gandhi).
  • We are always limited in our knowledge of any system, such as the system we call the universe, while we are ourselves a part of that system.” (Mathematician Kurt Godel’s incompleteness theorem).
  • Would you become a pilgrim in the road of Love? The first condition is that you make yourself humble as dust and ashes. (Ansari of Herat)
  • Truth is one; the sages call it by many names (Hindu scriptures).
  • Everything in the world is reborn. Men die and are reborn. Societies die and are reborn. The cosmos dies and is reborn. Everything goes and comes back. (Hindu saying)
  • In the absence of true self-knowledge, we hurt ourselves through misguided, exaggerated notions of self, others, external events, and physical things. (Prof. Jeffrey Hopkins)
  • The gods helped to explain the experience of transcendence. The perennial philosophy expresses our innate sense that there is more to human beings and to the material world than meets the eye. (Karen Hughes, Prof. of Philosophy)
  • From a very early date, it appears that human beings were distinguished by their ability to have ideas that went beyond their everyday experience. (Karen Hughes on Mythology)
  • Mythology and science both extend the scope of human beings. Like science and technology, mythology, as we shall see, is not about opting out of this world, but about enabling us to live more intensely with it. (Karen Hughes – Prof. of Philosophy)
  • Since the eighteenth century, we have developed a scientific view of history; we are concerned above all with what actually happened. But in the pre-modern world, when people wrote about the past they were more concerned with what an event meant. (Karen Hughes)
  • Mankind is nothing but a bundle of collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity and are in a perpetual flux and movement. (David Hume – Scottish Philosopher)
  • Promoting their methodological ineptitude to the rank of a criterion of truth, dogmatic scientists have often branded everything beyond the pale of their limited competence as unreal and even impossible. (Aldous Huxley)
  • Only the transcendent, the completely other, can be immanent without being modified by the becoming of that in which it dwells (Aldous Huxley)
  • Knowledge is a function of being. When there is a change in the being of the knower, there is corresponding change in the nature and amount of knowing. (Aldous Huxley)
  • The politics of those whose goal is beyond time are always pacific; it is the idolaters of past and future, of reactionary memory and Utopian dream, who do the persecuting and make the wars. (Aldous Huxley)
  • The Perennial Philosophy is primarily concerned with the one, divine Reality substantial to the manifold world of things and lives and minds. But the nature of the one Reality is such that it cannot be directly and immediately apprehended except by those who have chosen to fulfill certain conditions, making themselves loving, pure in heart, and poor in spirit. (Aldous Huxley)
  • We know that human minds have proved themselves capable of everything from imbecility to Quantum Theory, from Mein Kempf and sadism to the sanctity of Philip Neri, from metaphysics to crossword puzzles, power politics and Missa Solemnis. We also know that human minds are in some way associated with human brains, and we have fairly good reasons for supposing that there have been no considerable changes in the size and conformation of human brains for a good many thousand years. Consequently, it seems justifiable to infer that human minds in the remote past were capable of as many as various kinds and degrees of activity as are minds at the present time. (Aldous Huxley)
  • Direct knowledge of the Ground cannot be had except by union, and union can be achieved only by the annihilation of the self-regarding ego, which is the barrier separating the “thou” from the “That.” (Aldous Huxley)
  • If one is not oneself a sage or saint, the best thing one can do, in the field of metaphysics, is to study the works of those who were, and who, because they had modified their merely human mode of being were capable of a more than merely human kind and amount of knowledge. (Aldous Huxley)
  • For, as all exponents of the Perennial Philosophy have constantly insisted, man’s obsessive consciousness of, and insistence on being, a separate self is the final and most formidable obstacle to the universal knowledge of God. (Aldous Huxley)
  • It is only by making physical experiments that we can discover the intimate nature of matter and its potentialities. And it is only by making psychological and moral experiments that we can discover the intimate nature of mind and its potentialities (Aldous Huxley).
  • The manifold world of our everyday experiences is real with a relative reality that is, on its own level, unquestionable; but this relative reality has it’s being within and because of the absolute Reality, which, on account of the incommensurable otherness of its eternal nature, we can never hope to describe, even though it is possible for us directly to apprehend it. (Aldous Huxley)
  • All science, is the reduction of multiplicities to unities. (Aldous Huxley).
  • In India the scriptures were regarded not as revelations made at some given moment of history, but as eternal gospels, existent from everlasting to everlasting, in as much as coeval with man, or for that matter with any other kind of corporeal or incorporeal being possessed of reason. (Aldous Huxley).
  • Privation and suffering alone open the mind to all that is hidden from others (Igjugarjuk, Shaman of Eskimo tribe).
  • He who sees the Self in all beings and all beings in the self henceforth has no more remorse (Isha Upanishad)
  • He who is aware that both knowledge and ignorance should be pursued together overcomes death through ignorance and obtains immortality through knowledge (Isa Upanishad).
  • Religion is defined as the “feelings, acts and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.” (William James)
  • These subliminal aspects of everything that happens to us may seem to play a very little part in our daily lives. But they are the almost invisible roots of our conscious thoughts. (Carl Jung)
  • Myths do not belong, properly, to the rational mind. Rather, they bubble up from deep in the wells of collective conscious (Carl Jung).
  • Between the pillars of spirit and matter, the mind has put up a swing. There swings the bound soul and all the worlds with not even the slightest rest. The sun and moon also swing, and there is no end to it (Poet Kabir)
  • Behold but One in all things; it is the second that leads you astray. (Poet Kabir)
  • The hottest place in Hell is reserved for those who remain neutral in times of great moral conflict. (Martin Luther King, Jr.)
  • The raga exists in a trained listener’s mind even before it is heard. Time is not only a measure; it is a living entity that defines and refines our sense of ourselves as individuals and as a people. The most beautiful part of the time in music is the idea of created time. The creativity that is born out of purely structural rules that are imposed on a raga lacks the organic quality of creativity. (T. M. Krishna, Musician, in, ” A Southern Music.”)