CosmicUnity > CosmicUnity's Quotes

“People who’ve had any genuine spiritual experience always know that they don’t know. They are utterly humbled before mystery. They are in awe before the abyss of it all, in wonder at eternity and depth, and a Love, which is incomprehensible to the mind.”
― Richard Rohr

“The people who know God well—mystics, hermits, prayerful people, those who risk everything to find God—always meet a lover, not a dictator.”
― Richard Rohr, Everything Belongs: The Gift of Contemplative Prayer

“Faith does not need to push the river because faith is able to trust that there is a river. The river is flowing. We are in it.”
― Richard Rohr

“every time God forgives us, God is saying that God's own rules do not matter as much as the relationship that God wants to create with us.”
― Richard Rohr, Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life

“Who is telling us about the false self today? Who is even equipped tell us? Many clergy have not figured this out for themselves, since even ministry can be a career decision or an attraction to "religion" more than the result of an encounter with God or themselves. Formal religious status can maintain the false self rather effectively, especially if there are a lot of social payoffs like special respect, titles, salaries, a good self image, or nice costumes. It is no accident that the religious "Pharisees" became the symbolic bad guys in the Jesus story.”
― Richard Rohr, Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self

“a person must pass the lessons learned on to others—or there has been no real gift at all.”
― Richard Rohr, Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life

“Yes, transformation is often more about unlearning than learning, which is why the religious traditions call it “conversion” or “repentance.”
― Richard Rohr, Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life

“When I can stand in mystery (not knowing and not needing to know and being dazzled by such freedom), when I don’t need to split, to hate, to dismiss, to compartmentalize what I cannot explain or understand, when I can radically accept that “I am what I am what I am,” then I am beginning to stand in divine freedom (Galatians 5:1). We do not know how to stand there on our own. Someone Else needs to sustain us in such a deep and spacious place. This is what the saints mean by our emptiness, our poverty and our nothingness. They are not being negative or self-effacing, but just utterly honest about their inner experience. God alone can sustain me in knowing and accepting that I am not a saint, not at all perfect, not very loving at all—and in that very recognition I can fall into the perfect love of God. Remember Jesus’ first beatitude: “How happy are the poor in spirit, theirs is the kingdom of God” (Matthew 5:3). How amazing is that? I think this might just be the description of salvation and perfect freedom. They are the same, you know.”
― Richard Rohr, Radical Grace: Daily Meditations

“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, Everything Belongs: The Gift of Contemplative Prayer

“The Risen Christ is the standing icon of humanity in its final and full destiny. He is the pledge and guarantee of what God will do with all of our crucifixions. At last, we can meaningfully live with hope. It is no longer an absurd or tragic universe. Our hurts now become the home for our greatest hopes.”
― Richard Rohr, Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self

“We grow spiritually much more by doing it wrong than by doing it right.”
― Richard Rohr, Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life

“When we lose the contemplative mind, or non-dual consciousness, we invariably create violent people. The dualistic mind is endlessly argumentative, and we created an argumentative continent, which we also exported to North and South America. We see it in our politics; we see it in our Church’s inability to create any sincere interfaith dialogue—or even intra-faith dialogue. The Baptists are still fighting the Anglicans as “lost” and the Evangelicals are dismissing the Catholics as the “Whore of Babylon,” and we Catholics are demeaning everybody else as heretics, and each of us is hiding in our small, smug circles. What a waste of time and good God-energy, while the world suffers and declines. We have divided Jesus.”
― Richard Rohr, Silent Compassion: Finding God in Contemplation

“Right words make all of us feel falsely important. Right action keeps all of us forever beginners.”
― Richard Rohr, Adam's Return: The Five Promises of Male Initiation

“True spirituality is not taught, it's caught. Once our sails have been unfurled to the Spirit, henceforth our motivation for the journey toward holiness and wholeness is immense gratitude.”
― Richard Rohr, Adam's Return: The Five Promises of Male Initiation

“Perhaps the True Self--and the full Christ Mystery (not the same as organized Christianity)--will always live in the backwaters of any empire and the deep mines of any religion.”
― Richard Rohr, Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self

“There must be, and, if we are honest, there always will be at least one situation in our lives that we cannot fix, control, explain, change, or even understand. For Jesus and for his followers, the crucifixion became the dramatic symbol of that necessary and absurd stumbling stone.”
― Richard Rohr, Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life

“The hope is that science gives us objective truth; religion, however, gives us personal meaning or personal truth. They should not be seen as contraries.”
― Richard Rohr, Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self

“In fact, I would say that the demand for the perfect is the greatest enemy of the good.”
― Richard Rohr, Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life

“God for us, God alongside us, God within us.”
― Richard Rohr, The Divine Dance: The Trinity and Your Transformation

“Remember, mystery isn’t something that you cannot understand—it is something that you can endlessly understand! There is no point at which you can say, “I’ve got it.” Always and forever, mystery gets you!”
― Richard Rohr, The Divine Dance: The Trinity and Your Transformation

“All the darkness in the world cannot extinguish the light of a single candle.”
― St. Francis Of Assisi, The Little Flowers of St. Francis of Assisi

“Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love,
Where there is injury, pardon;
Where there is doubt, faith;
Where there is despair, hope;
Where there is darkness, light;
And where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek
to be consoled as to console,
to be understood as to understand,
to be loved, as to love.

For it is in giving that we receive,
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.”
― Anglican clergyman

“The deeds you do may be the only sermon some persons will hear today”
― St. Francis Of Assisi

“Preach the Gospels everyday & only if you have to...use words.”
― St. Francis of Assisi

“If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.”
― Mark Twain

“′Classic′ - a book which people praise and don't read.”
― Mark Twain

“A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”
― Mark Twain

“In truth,there was only one christian and he died on the cross.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“This deepening of love is the real purpose of the dark night of the soul. The dark night helps us become who we are created to be: lovers of God and one another.”
― Gerald G. May, The Dark Night of the Soul: A Deep Dive into the Shadow Side of Spirituality, Embracing Disorientation, Doubt, and Despair for Authentic Spiritual Growth and Wholeness

“Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling me who I am.”
― Parker J. Palmer, Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation