Last Updated on September 2, 2024
People are usually more inclined to appreciate and work on things that they can see or focus on matters that are easily be measured, such as academics, relationships, careers, and our physical appearances.
From a young age, we were taught to excel in school, to work hard for a good career, and to make ourselves physically appealing. We spend most of our days worrying about managing these external factors and believe them to be the basis of our existence.
Without hesitation, we strive to reach the goals we have set for ourselves, but despite our focus, we can easily and suddenly feel lost. Amidst any success, we may begin to question our existence and our purpose.
We may even feel ourselves drowning in confusion, taught as we were that acquiring material wealth and succeeding in our careers equate to happiness.
While we may think that these things will bring us happiness and peace, the truth is that everything starts inside. While aiming for the stars, it’s easy to lose sight of the one thing that should matter the most: your spirit.
To be more specific, we all need to pay attention to the awakening of our spirituality. When you feel an inexplicable loneliness and can’t quite put a finger on it why, it’s a sign that your soul needs a spiritual awakening.
Let’s Talk About Spiritual Wakefulness
Spiritual wakefulness occurs when a person begins to develop a deeper sense of the world and of themselves. It is when a person begins to acknowledge that there is another dimension beyond the confines of their ego.
Being spiritually awake means gaining a deeper understanding that you are a part of something bigger than yourself, that you are one not just with yourself but also with the world around you. No matter what gains or losses you encounter in life, you’re aware that these merely happen on the surface. Spiritual wakefulness allows you to let go of your self-imposed limitations and superficial fears because it empowers you with the knowledge that you are a part of a grand scheme.
The path to spiritual awakening can be overwhelming. It can even be frightening. Apart from potentially being forced out of your comfort zone, you may question everything you thought you knew. However, don’t let confusion or fear stop you from searching for your true purpose in the world.
Signs That You are Spiritually Awake
In a spiritual awakening experiment conducted four years ago, 94.2% of its participants began to live a better life after being spiritually awakening.
These are some of the signs:
- Paying more attention to the environment and nature. You find yourself noticing and appreciating nature more. It’s more than a backdrop, and you’ll feel more grateful for its role.
- Saying NO to negativity. You avoid people who bring negativity into your space. Gossip no longer interests you, and you become less judgmental of people. You also actively choose to be with people who promote positivity and peace.
- Authenticity. You no longer feel the need to conform to a standard definition of beauty or success. With the knowledge that you are here for a reason, you finally embrace even your flaws and become more accepting of your true self.
- Living in the present. The past and future no longer cause you as much worry. You learn to live in the moment, appreciating what happens because these experiences are all part of a grand scheme. You notice your anxiety lessening as you let go of regrets, fears, and hurt.
- Inner peace. Your mood is no longer affected as much by what you now identify as “small things”. Little worries and details don’t have any power over you anymore. The way you live your life no longer depends on external factors like what others think of you or material possessions because you have inner peace.
The path towards spiritual awakening may be triggered by different situations, but the result is always similar: a deeper connection with your spirit and with the world.
To jumpstart your own journey, we compiled 90 spiritual quotes for your reflection.
Spiritual Quotes
- “The most wasted of all days is one without laughter.” – Nicolas Chamfort
- “More smiling, less worrying. More compassion, less judgment. More blessed, less stressed. More love, less hate.” – Roy T. Bennett, The Light in the Heart
- “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
- “No woman wants to be in submission to a man who isn’t in submission to God!” – T D Jakes
- “A single day is enough to make us a little larger or, another time, a little smaller.” – Paul Klee
- “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.” – Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
- “What you are is God’s gift to you, what you become is your gift to God.” – Hans Urs von Balthasar, Prayer
- “My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind.” – Albert Einstein
- “The moment God is figured out with nice neat lines and definitions, we are no longer dealing with God.” – Rob Bell, Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith
- “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
- “I have lived with several Zen masters – all of them cats.” – Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now
- “Your sacred space is where you can find yourself over and over again.” – Joseph Campbell
- “Re-examine all you have been told. Dismiss what insults your soul.” – Walt Whitman
- “When you connect to the silence within you, that is when you can make sense of the disturbance going on around you.” – Stephen Richards
- “Do not abandon yourselves to despair. We are the Easter people and hallelujah is our song.” – Pope John Paul II
- “You were born a child of light’s wonderful secret – you return to the beauty you have always been.” – Aberjhani, Visions of a Skylark Dressed in Black
- “If you don’t behave as you believe, you will end by believing as you behave.” – Fulton J. Sheen
- “Religion is for people who’re afraid of going to hell. Spirituality is for those who’ve already been there.” – Vine Deloria Jr.
- “Crying is one of the highest devotional songs. One who knows crying, knows spiritual practice. If you can cry with a pure heart, nothing else compares to such a prayer. Crying includes all the principles of Yoga.” – Kripalvanandji
- “Self-talk reflects your innermost feelings.” – Dr. Asa Don Brown
- “The power of human thought grows exponentially with the number of minds that share that thought.” – Dan Brown, The Lost Symbol
- “The reality of loving God is loving him like he’s a Superhero who actually saved you from stuff rather than a Santa Claus who merely gave you some stuff.” – Criss Jami, Killosophy
- “If a man is to live, he must be all alive, body, soul, mind, heart, spirit.” – Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude
- “Each star is a mirror reflecting the truth inside you.” – Aberjhani, Journey through the Power of the Rainbow
- “I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.” – Susan B. Anthony
- “You are never alone. You are eternally connected with everyone.” – Amit Ray, Meditation
- “Reflection is the lamp of the heart. If it departs, the heart will have no light.” – Imam Al-Haddad
- “These things will destroy the human race: politics without principle, progress without compassion, wealth without work, learning without silence, religion without fearlessness, and worship without awareness.” – Anthony de Mello
- “An awake heart is like a sky that pours light.” – Hafiz
- “The spiritual life does not remove us from the world but leads us deeper into it.” – Nouwen Henri J. M.
- “When a woman rises up in glory, her energy is magnetic and her sense of possibility contagious.”
- Marianne Williamson, A Woman’s Worth
- “When everything gets answered, it’s fake.” – Sean Penn
- “Beautify your inner dialogue. Beautify your inner world with love light and compassion. Life will be beautiful.” – Amit Ray, Nonviolence: The Transforming Power
- “Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That’s where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go.” – Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost
- “Soul connections are not often found and are worth every bit of fight left in you to keep.” – Shannon Alder
- “Love is not an emotion. It is your very existence.” – Sri Sri Ravi Shankar
- “PTSD is a whole-body tragedy, an integral human event of enormous proportions with massive repercussions.” – Susan Pease Banitt
- “Most people are slow to champion love because they fear the transformation it brings into their lives. And make no mistake about it: love does take over and transform the schemes and operations of our egos in a very mighty way.” – Aberjhani, Journey through the Power of the Rainbow
- “The Way is not in the sky; the Way is in the heart.” – Gautama Buddha
- “Un-winged and naked, sorrow surrenders its crown to a throne called grace.” – Aberjhani, The River of Winged Dreams
- “The Holy Land is everywhere.” – Black Elk
- “Until you have suffered much in your heart, you cannot learn humility.” – Elder Thaddeus of Vitovnica, Our Thoughts Determine Our Lives
- “And the time came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” – Anaïs Nin
- “God is whispering in your heart, in the whole existence, just tune your ears.” – Amit Ray, Meditation
- “The heart is like a woman, and the head is like a man, and although man is the head of woman, woman is the heart of man, and she turns man’s head because she turns his heart.” – Peter Kreeft, Jesus-Shock
- “Too many people get credit for being good, when they are only being passive. They are too often praised for being broadminded when they are so broadminded they can never make up their minds about anything.” – Fulton J. Sheen
- “When you catch yourself slipping into a pool of negativity, notice how it derives from nothing other than resistance to the current situation.” – Donna Quesada, Buddha in the Classroom
- “Feel nothing, know nothing, do nothing, have nothing, give up all to God, and say utterly, ‘Thy will be done.’ We only dream this bondage. Wake up and let it go.” – Swami Vivekananda
- “God loved us before he made us; and his love has never diminished and never shall.” – Julian of Norwich
- “He who thinks half-heartedly will not believe in God; but he who really thinks has to believe in God.” – Isaac Newton
- “We all have bad days, but one thing is true; no cloud is so dark that the sun can’t shine through.” – Miranda Kerr
- “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, The Dance
- “Live simply. Deepest joy is like a flower…beautiful in essence.” – Tony Samara
- “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
- “Nothing in all creation is so like God as stillness.” – Meister Eckhart
- “It takes darkness to be aware of the light.” – Treasure Tatum
- “You become mature when you become the authority of your own life.” – Joseph Campbell, A Joseph Campbell Companion
- “Make peace with silence, and remind yourself that it is in this space that you’ll come to remember your spirit. When you’re able to transcend an aversion to silence, you’ll also transcend many other miseries. And it is in this silence that the remembrance of God will be activated.” – Wayne W. Dyer
- “Whole life is a search for beauty. But, when the beauty is found inside, the search ends and a beautiful journey begins.” – Harshit Walia
- “The superior man, when resting in safety, does not forget that danger may come. When in a state of security he does not forget the possibility of ruin. When all is orderly, he does not forget that disorder may come. Thus his person is not endangered, and his States and all their clans are preserved.” – Confucius, Confucian Analects, The Great Learning The Doctrine of the Mean
- “Not till your thoughts cease all their branching here and there, not till you abandon all thoughts of seeking for something, not till your mind is motionless as wood or stone, will you be on the right road to the Gate.” – Huang Po, The Zen Teaching of Huang Po
- “We would do ourselves a tremendous favor by letting go of the people who poison our spirit.” – Steve Maraboli, Unapologetically You
- “Love spiritually, not strategically.” – T.F. Hodge, From Within I Rise
- “Within each of us is a light, awake, encoded in the fibers of our existence. Divine ecstasy is the totality of this marvelous creation experienced in the hearts of humanity.” – Tony Samara
- “My biggest fear, even now, is that I will hear Jesus’ words and walk away, content to settle for less than radical obedience to Him.” – David Platt, Radical
- “Once you have surrendered yourself, you make yourself receptive. In receiving from God, you are perfected and completed.” – Fulton J. Sheen, Seven Words of Jesus and Mary
- “Except for the point, the still point, There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.” – T. S. Eliot
- “Like those in the valley behind us, most people stand in sight of the spiritual mountains all their lives and never enter them, being content to listen to others who have been there and thus avoid the hardships.” – Robert M. Pirsig
- “What we do in every other area of our lives (other than religion), is, rather than respect somebody’s beliefs, we evaluate their reasons.” – Sam Harris
- “A healer’s power stems not from any special ability, but from maintaining the courage and awareness to embody and express the universal healing power that every human being naturally possesses.” – Eric Micha’el Leventhal
- “The greatest untold story is the evolution of God.” – G.I. Gurdjieff
- “Life’s trials will test you, and shape you, but don’t let them change who you are.” – Aaron Lauritsen, 100 Days Drive
- “Living in a world such as this is like dancing on a live volcano.” – Kentetsu Takamori
- “Isn’t this enough? Just this world? Just THIS?” – Tim Minchin
- “I understand once again that the greatness of God always reveals itself in the simple things.” – Paulo Coelho, Like the Flowing River
- “All Earthquakes and Disasters are warnings; there’s too much corruption in the world.” – Aristotle
- “The bird is gone, and in what meadow does it now sing?” – Philip K. Dick, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said
- “If I am going to be drowned – if I am going to be drowned – if I am going to be drowned, why, in the name of the seven mad gods who rule the sea, was I allowed to come thus far and contemplate sand and trees?” – Stephen Crane, The Open Boat and Other Stories
- “Sometimes resilience arrives in the moment you discover your own unshakeable goodness.” – Gregory Boyle, Tattoos on the Heart
- “We are not here to match and homogenize and agree on every point. One size of spirituality does not fit all. We are here to be our divine selves, boldly, passionately, respectfully, to the absolute best of our ability – and this, this is more than enough.” – Sera Break
- “When angels speak of love they tell us it is only by loving that we enter an earthly paradise. They tell us paradise is our home and love our true destiny.” – Bell Hooks, All About Love: New Visions
- “The Christian life is not about pleasing God the finger-shaker and judge. It is not about believing now or being good now for the sake of heaven later. It is about entering a relationship in the present that begins to change everything now. Spirituality is about this process: the opening of the heart to the God who is already here.” – Marcus J. Borg, The God We Never Knew
- “It’s not much. You begin by thinking there is something extraordinary about it. But you’ll find out, when you’ve been out in the world a while longer, unhappiness is the commonest thing there is.” – Erich Maria Remarque, Flotsam
- “These fools who haven’t the slightest idea how to live the morals they espouse. These fools who proclaim themselves men of God, yet show not the slightest reverance to His word…Is it any different from a drunkard preaching temperance? A whore preaching modesty?” – Seth Grahame-Smith, Abraham Lincoln
- “Electricity was a reality in the universe when Moses led the children of Israel out of the land of Egypt. This is true of all natural laws; they have always existed but only when understood may they be used.” – Ernest Holmes, The Science of Mind
- “Receive with simplicity everything that happens to you.” – Rashi
- “If you always attach positive emotions to the things you want, and never attach negative emotions to the things you don’t, then that which you desire most will invariably come your way.” – Matt D. Miller
- “He who does not reflect his life back to God in gratitude does not know himself.” – Albert Schweitzer, Reverence for Life
- “What drains your spirit drains your body. What fuels your spirit fuels your body.” – Carolyn Myss, Anatomy of the Spirit
- “We tend to be preoccupied by our problems when we have a heightened sense of vulnerability and a diminished sense of power. Today, see each problem as an invitation to prayer.” – John Ortberg, The Me I Want to Be
