80 Quotes That Will Help You Reflect on Your Spiritual Journey

If you’re someone who turns to Bible verses in search of strength, hope, and guidance, you’re likely already aware of the benefits that religion can have in your day-to-day life. Spirituality, which is a broad category that includes various religious traditions, functions similarly. As Verywell Mind explains, spirituality is generally “a belief in something beyond the self.” This can mean belief in a higher power, but it can also more simply mean “a holistic belief in an individual connection to others and to the world as a whole.” This list of spiritual quotes illuminates the wide scope of ideas, across several belief systems, that spirituality explores.

Like religion, spirituality in the more general sense has been associated with improved health and well-being. Research shows that utilizing spiritual beliefs can be a productive way to cope with some of life’s greatest challenges, including times of stress, depression, and grief. Not only does spirituality alleviate some of these mental and physical conditions, but it can also provide a source of social support through engagement with organized communities.

Whether you’re a devout observer of a specific religion, or just dipping your toes into the world of spirituality, these quotes will help you reflect on your journey thus far, and provide inspiration to dive further in. If you enjoy them, you can also share the quotes with family, to get the conversation going amongst your loved ones too.

1. "The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper." – W.B. Yeats
2. "Just as a candle cannot burn without fire, man cannot live without a spiritual life." – Buddha
3. "Since love grows within you, so beauty grows. For love is the beauty of the soul." – Augustine
4. "Awakening is not changing who you are, but discarding who you are not." – Deepak Chopra
5. "I understand once again that the greatness of God always reveals itself in the simple things." – Paulo Coelho
6. "Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality." – Carl Sagan
7. "I believe in God, but not as one thing, not as an old man in the sky. I believe that what people call God is something in all of us. I believe that what Jesus and Mohammed and Buddha and all the rest said was right. It's just that the translations have gone wrong." – John Lennon
   
   
   
8. "The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you really are." – Carl Jung
9. "The great thing to remember is that though our feelings come and go God's love for us does not." – C.S. Lewis
10. "To speak gratitude is courteous and pleasant, but to live gratitude is to touch heaven." – Johannes A. Gaertner
11. "Spirituality: the art of keeping your internal fire alive." – Maxime Lagacé
12. “It isn’t until you come to a spiritual understanding of who you are – not necessarily a religious feeling, but deep down, the spirit within – that you can begin to take control.” – Oprah Winfrey
13. “You have to grow from the inside out. None can teach you, none can make you spiritual. There is no other teacher but your own soul.” – Swami Vivekananda
14. “If you do a good job for others, you heal yourself at the same time, because a dose of joy is a spiritual cure. It transcends all barriers.” – Ed Sullivan
15. “You are never alone. You are eternally connected with everyone.” – Amit Ray
16. “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.” – Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
17. “A sacrifice to be real must cost, must hurt, and must empty ourselves. Give yourself fully to God. He will use you to accomplish great things on the condition that you believe much more in His love than in your weakness.” – Mother Teresa
18. “Religion is for people who're afraid of going to hell. Spirituality is for those who've already been there.” – Vine Deloria Jr.
    
    
    
19. “A quiet conscience makes one strong!” – Anne Frank
20. “The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware; joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.” – Henry Miller
21. “You can't have a physical transformation until you have a spiritual transformation.” – Cory Booker
22. “The unexamined life is not worth living.” – Socrates
23. “It is not in the stars to hold our destiny but in ourselves.” – William Shakespeare
24. “Sometimes I think there are only two instructions we need to follow to develop and deepen our spiritual life: slow down and let go.” – Oriah Mountain Dreamer
25. “Peaceful is the one who’s not concerned with having more or less. Unbound by name and fame, he is free from sorrow from the world and mostly from himself.” – Rumi
26. “Spirituality is recognizing and celebrating that we are all inextricably connected to each other by a power greater than all of us and that our connection to that power and to one another is grounded in love and compassion. Practicing spirituality brings a sense of perspective, meaning and purpose to our lives.” – Brené Brown
27. “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
28. “We are all connected; To each other, biologically. To the earth, chemically. To the rest of the universe atomically.”– Neil DeGrasse Tyson
29. “Enlightenment means taking full responsibility for your life.” – William Blake
    
    
    
30. “You do not need to work to become spiritual. You are spiritual; you need only to remember that fact. Spirit is within you. God is within you.” – Julia Cameron
31. “At any moment, you have a choice, that either leads you closer to your spirit or further away from it.” – Thich Nhat Hanh
32. “What drains your spirit drains your body. What fuels your spirit fuels your body.” ― Caroline Myss
33. “Happiness cannot be traveled to, owned, earned, worn, or consumed. Happiness is the spiritual experience of living every minute with love, grace, and gratitude.” – Denis Waitley
34. “He who does not reflect his life back to God in gratitude does not know himself.” ― Albert Schweitzer
35. “Hope is some extraordinary spiritual grace that God gives us to control our fears, not to oust them.” – Vincent McNabb
36. “The spiritual journey is the unlearning of fear and the acceptance of love.” – Marianne Williamson
37. “The spiritual life is not a life before, after, or beyond our everyday existence. No, the spiritual life can only be real when it is lived in the midst of the pains and joys of the here and now.” – Henri Nouwen
38. “Re-examine all you have been told. Dismiss what insults your soul.” – Walt Whitman
    
    
    
39. “Your sacred space is where you can find yourself over and over again.” – Joseph Campbell
40. “Prayer is not asking. It is a longing of the soul. It is daily admission of one’s weakness. It is better in prayer to have a heart without words than words without a heart.” – Mahatma Gandhi
41. “Learn to get in touch with the silence within yourself and know that everything in this life has a purpose. There are no mistakes, no coincidences. All events are blessings given to us to learn from.” – Elizabeth Kübler-Ross
42. "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
43. “Sometimes religion gets in the way of God.” – Bono
44. “You have to expect spiritual warfare whenever you stand up for righteousness or call attention to basic values. It's just a matter of light battling the darkness. But the light wins every time. You can't throw enough darkness on light to put it out.” – Thomas Kinkade
    
    
    
45. "If your compassion does not include yourself, it is incomplete." – Jack Kornfield
46. “Realization is not the acquisition of anything new nor is it a new faculty. It is only removal of all camouflage.” – Ramana Maharshi
47. “The soul is placed in the body like a rough diamond and must be polished, or the luster of it will never appear.“ – Daniel Defoe
48. “Energy can't be created or destroyed, and energy flows. It must be in a direction, with some kind of internal, emotive, spiritual direction. It must have some effect somewhere.” – Keanu Reeves
49. “Wake up and live.” – Bob Marley
50. “Empathy is really the opposite of spiritual meanness. It's the capacity to understand that every war is both won and lost. And that someone else's pain is as meaningful as your own.” – Barbara Kingsolver
51. “No matter your religious or spiritual beliefs … for every person who inhales and exhales… you are alive, you can dream.” – Georgia Dawkins
    
    
    
52. “Within you, there is a stillness and a sanctuary to which you can retreat at any time and be yourself.” – Hermann Hesse
53. “God will test you because he wants you to grow up. He wants you to mature. He wants you to develop a walk with him that is not based on your fluctuating emotions but on your commitment to him as you learn to walk by faith.” – Greg Laurie
54. “Good humor and laughter are far too wonderful not to come straight from the heart of God.” – Beth Moore
55. “Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
56. “The spiritual life does not remove us from the world but leads us deeper into it.” – Henri J.M. Nouwen
57. “Big-heartedness is the most essential virtue on the spiritual journey.” – Matthew Fox
58. “Never doubt God in the darkness what he has given us in the light.”― Francine Rivers
59. “Physical strength can never permanently withstand the impact of spiritual force.” – Franklin D. Roosevelt
    
    
    
60. “Only if we understand, will we care. Only if we care, will we help. Only if we help shall all be saved.” –Jane Goodall
61. “It is not the end of the physical body that should worry us. Rather, our concern must be to live while we're alive - to release our inner selves from the spiritual death that comes with living behind a facade designed to conform to external definitions of who and what we are.” – Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
    
62. “Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life.” – Ludwig van Beethoven
63. "The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves." – Alan Watts
64. “It is in pardoning that we are pardoned.” – Francis of Assisi
65. "You can read books without ever stepping into a library; and practice spirituality without ever going to a temple." – Anthony de Mello
    
    
    
66. “When you realize there is no lacking, the whole world belongs to you.” – Lao Tzu
67. “Excellence encourages one about life generally; it shows the spiritual wealth of the world.” – George Eliot
68. “Love is the doorway through which the human soul passes from selfishness to service.” – Jack Hyles
69. “If you think you’re enlightened, go spend a week with your family.” – Ram Dass
70. “We do not need more intellectual power, we need more spiritual power. We do not need more of the things that are seen, we need more of the things that are unseen.” – Calvin Coolidge
71. “Let the breath lead the way.” – Sharon Salzberg
72. "Happy people build their inner world; unhappy people blame their outer world." –Dalai Lama
    
    
    
73. “When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don’t seem to matter very much, do they?” – Virginia Woolf
74. “Take care of your inner, spiritual beauty. That will reflect in your face.” – Dolores del Río
75. “The especial genius of women I believe to be electrical in movement, intuitive in function, spiritual in tendency.” – Margaret Fuller
76. “I see poetry as spiritual medicine.” – Mahmoud Darwish
77. “Realize deeply that the present moment is all you have. Make the now the primary focus of your life.” – Eckhart Tolle
78. “Relax into the moment and let the universe do the driving. If there was a secret to happiness in life, I’d say that was it.” – Jed McKenna
79. “Do anything, but let it produce joy.” – Walt Whitman
80. “You will face many defeats in life, but never let yourself be defeated.” – Maya Angelou

Samantha Lawyer

Sam Lawyer is a lifestyle writer and television producer based in New York City. She’s been contributing to Woman’s Day for nearly five years, and covers a variety of topics from gifting, to health, and entertainment. Her work has additionally been featured in Cosmopolitan, Country Living, and Good Housekeeping. When she’s not writing or producing, you can find her binging her favorite Bravo shows or getting walked by her French Bulldog.