Top 100 Quotes About Mysticism
#1. When I play sports, when I dance, when I teach mysticism, I cannot explain, even to myself, how I do what I do.
Frederick Lenz
#2. Religion is to mysticism what popularization is to science.
Henri Bergson
#3. Maybe it wasn't anything remotely to do with religion, mysticism or metaphilosophy after all; maybe it was more banal; maybe it was just ... accounting.
Iain Banks
#4. I read all of Rider Haggard's books. For me he had the romance of Africa with a little bit of mysticism. I'm delighted to be looked on as his heir and be categorised as an adventure novelist because that's exactly what I am.
Wilbur Smith
#5. Everything begins in mysticism and ends in politics.
Charles Peguy
#6. Suzuki also frequently quotes a sentence of Eckhart's: "The eye wherein I see God is the same eye wherein God sees me" (Suzuki, Mysticism: East and West, p. 50) as an exact expression of what Zen means by Prajna.
Thomas Merton
#7. Mysticism - Magic and Yoga - is the means, therefore, to a new universal life, richer, greater and more full of resource than ever before, as free as sunlight, as gracious as the unfolding of a rose. It is for man (and woman) to take.
Israel Regardie
#8. That is beautiful mysticism, it is a - "
"Please not to call it by any name," said Dorothea, putting out her hands entreatingly. "You will say it is Persian, or something geographical. It is my life. I have found it out and cannot part with it.
George Eliot
#9. I don't think there is any incompatibility between science and mysticism ... Immanent religion is the only form of religion in which there is no conflict at all, that I can see, between science and religion.
Aldous Huxley
#10. Religious mysticism is intellectual garbage. It's a vestige of the old superstitious Dark Ages when nobody knew anything ... It is one of those delusions that isn't called insane only because there are so many people involved.
Robert M. Pirsig
#11. Likewise, if we offer too much silent assent about mysticism and superstition - even when it seems to be doing a little good - we abet a general climate in which scepticism is considered impolite, science tiresome, and rigorous thinking somehow stuffy and inappropriate.
Carl Sagan
#12. The language of [Catholic] mysticism - its repeated attempts to lay consciousness itself bare and speak all the intensely opposing yet interconnected parts of it that cannot be spoken.
Helen Oyeyemi
#13. Mysticism occurs whenever a human being sees the separation between the natural and the supernatural, between the temporal and the eternal, as overcome.
Albert Schweitzer
#14. All true religion, all true morality, all true mysticism have but one object, and that is to act on humanity, collective and individual, in such a manner that it shall correspond efficiently with the great law of development, and co-operate consciously therewith to achieve the end of development.
A. E. Waite
#15. Mysticism cuts through bullshit, and it takes you right there to the experience. Everything in your life is eventually set up as a pragmatic energy flow into the light.
Frederick Lenz
#16. I started studying mythology, just on my own. Joseph Campbell, mysticism.
Antoine Fuqua
#17. I had been a kind of natural mystic my whole life, growing up there in Tennessee next to the river. Somehow, that was important for my consciousness. I still don't study [mysticism]. I just wait for experiences.
Coleman Barks
#18. Mysticism joins and unites; reason divides and separates. People crave belonging more than understanding. Hence the prominent role of mysticism, and the limited role of reason in human affairs.
Thomas Szasz
#19. Mysticism is the mistake of an accidental and individual symbol for an universal one.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#20. A banal mysticism, which is so banal that all the mysticism seems to have evaporated long ago, binds 'us' to the homeland - that special place which is more than a place, more than a geophysical area.
Michael Billig
#21. The whole planet reeks of mysticism without revelation.
Dan Simmons
#22. 'Mysticism' here means, in the literal sense, a change of sensory impressions and organ sensations into something unreal and beyond this world.
Wilhelm Reich
#23. There is a certain mysticism in the Christian's affirmation of the physical universe. There is a confidence that whatever is discovered conforms with Jesus Christ and is a manifestation of His will.
Gene Edward Veith Jr.
#24. Sex is the mysticism of materialism and the only possible religion in a materialistic society.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#25. My music, it breathes. It's the mysticism of sound. I'm a sound seeker, and I'm enthralled with it, by what it can do to change the molecules and uplift people. They feel something when we play. I can't take authorship for that. I can take that I'm in service.
Charles Lloyd
#27. Sufism is not a religion or a philosophy, it is neither deism nor atheism, nor is it a moral, nor a special kind of mysticism, being free from the usual religious sectarianism. If ever it could be called a religion, it would only be as a religion of love, harmony, and beauty.
Hazrat Inayat Khan
#28. I'm a seeker. I'm very much a believer in science. But I do think there are times when science and mysticism intersect.
Nicolas Cage
#29. It is common enough for those who have any touch of "Mysticism" . . . to be absolutely unable to find any meaning in vocal prayers.
John Chapman
#30. Suffering predisposes the mind to devoutness; and most young girls, prompted by instinctive tenderness, lean towards mysticism, the obscurer side of religion.
Honore De Balzac
#31. Prejudices, mysticism, bigotry these things only distort religion, like they have actually done to the most religions of the world.
Abhijit Naskar
#32. We are at home here. Alienation is unnecessary. Contact with reality at a deep level is part of the Christian's life. He enters into reality, rather than escaping from it. The flight from reality is a mark of Eastern and classical mysticism, not of Christianity.
Hans Rookmaaker
#33. When science starts to be interpretive
it is more unscientific even than mysticism.
D.H. Lawrence
#34. If you're a true student of the truth, you may easily get frustrated when people try to make points based on mysticism and cultural beliefs.
Assegid Habtewold
#37. Moralism is always the cheap substitute for mysticism.
Richard Rohr
#38. Mysticism keeps mankind sane. As long as you have mystery you have health; when you destroy mystery you create morbidity.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#39. A time comes when it isn't enough to read about Buddha, we wish to have that happen to ourselves. That's when we move from the exoteric to the esoteric, from religion to mysticism.
Frederick Lenz
#40. Mysticism is colourful and alluring, but if you are after the truth, science is the best path!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#41. It has become the fashion to talk about Mysticism, even to pose as Mystics, and - need it be said? - those who talk the most on such subjects are those who know the least.
Thomas Aquinas
#42. In mysticism, there's more of a sense of adventure, of camaraderie.
Frederick Lenz
#43. Mysticism and empiricism go together in opposition to scholasticism ... they base themselves on the non-linear world of experience rather than the linear world of letters.
Alan Watts
#45. In mysticism we deal with dreaming and the fields of perception.
Frederick Lenz
#46. Mysticism requires the notion of the unknowable, which is revealed to some and withheld from others; this divides men into those who feel guilt and those who cash in on it.
Ayn Rand
#47. There is a single main definition of the object of all magical Ritual. It is the uniting of the Microcosm with the Macrocosm. The Supreme and Complete Ritual is therefore the Invocation of the Holy Guardian Angel; or, in the language of Mysticism, Union with God.
Aleister Crowley
#48. As an inspiration to the author, I do not think the cat can be over-estimated. He suggests so much grace, power, beauty, motion, mysticism. I do not wonder that many writers love cats; I am only surprised that all do not.
Carl Van Vechten
#49. Mysticism is not this or that particular cup on the table; it is the water poured into all of them.
Vernon Howard
#50. Faith and force ... are corollaries: every period of history dominated by mysticism, was a period of statism, of dictatorship, of tyranny.
Ayn Rand
#51. Mysticism is the acquired immunodeficiency of regional ontologies; one catches it through unprotected thought intercourse with the stirred-up concept of the infinite.
Peter Sloterdijk
#52. Liking money like I like it, is nothing less than mysticism. Money is a glory.
Salvador Dali
#53. In order to pass into other dimensions you need to really understand what is out there. A teacher of mysticism is able to explain how to deal with these other worlds and universes.
Frederick Lenz
#54. I see science and mysticism as two complementary manifestations of the human mind; as its rational and intuitive faculties.
Capra
Katherine Ramsland
#55. There is some unwritten code or law that all women or means must be into Hinduism or Mysticism or psychics by the time they reach fifty years of age. The male equivalent is ornate guns. All aging women find psychics, all aging males find gun cabinets and expensive brandy. There's your truth.
Nathan Yocum
#56. Mysticism and supernaturalism are the descendants of ignorance and fear.
Abhijit Naskar
#57. Mysticism, in the narrow sense, implies a specific experience which is foreign to most poets and most men, but on the other hand, it represents an instinct which is a human sine qua non.
Louis MacNeice
#58. Mysticism is the passionate longing of the soul for God ...
Evelyn Underhill
#61. The parallels to modern physics [with mysticism] appear not only in the Vedas of Hinduism, in the I Ching, or in the Buddhist sutras, but also in the fragments of Heraclitus, in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, or in the teachings of the Yaqui sorcerer Don Juan.
Fritjof Capra
#62. For what is Mysticism? It is not the attempt to draw near to God, not by rites or ceremonies, but by inward disposition? Is it not merely a hard word for 'The Kingdom of Heaven is within'? Heaven is neither a place nor a time.
Florence Nightingale
#63. The cross. He held one in his hand, gold and shiny in the morning sun. This, too, drove the vampires away.
Why? Was there a logical answer, something he could accept without slipping on banana skins of mysticism?
Richard Matheson
#64. One idea I explore in my stand-up show is whether, if you try looking at the universe rationally and avoid coping mechanisms like mysticism or religion, you can still be happy knowing you are going to die after a brief time on this spinning ball.
Robin Ince
#65. Mysticism is the acceptance that everything cannot be logically explained.
Frederick Lenz
#66. I don't know what to make of the Muslim mystics, especially those who have come to be known as the Sufis. What do they experience in their mystic experiences? Could they have encountered the same God we do in our Christian mysticism?
Tony Campolo
#69. Mysticism is like pure science; it has no use. Mysticism is just the human longing to know ... Occult is not science. Occult is just technology.
Jaggi Vasudev
#70. The whole secret of mysticism is this: that man can understand everything by the help of something he cannot understand.
G.K. Chesterton
#71. Christian spirituality does not rest on mysticism; it rests in a Mediator.
Kevin DeYoung
#72. The only thing that has kept the race of men from the mad extremes of the convent and the pirate-galley, the night-club and the lethal chamber, has been mysticism - the belief that logic is misleading, and that things are not what they seem.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#73. My teacher, Hopkins, often commented on the craving for certainty that led so many physicists into mysticism or into the Church and similar organisations ... Faith seems to be an occupational hazard for physicists.
Norman Pirie
#74. Mysticism, poor mysticism! When it is underestimated and oversimplified, it comes down from its original sphere and stands beside religion.
Sri Chinmoy
#75. The exoteric Islam doesn't interest me more than any other religion. But the mysticism interests me. It's like Hinduism.
[Frithjof Schuon: Messenger of the Perennialist Philosophy DVD]
Frithjof Schuon
#76. The tendency to believe vague statements designed to appeal to just about anyone is called the Forer effect, and psychologists point to this phenomenon to explain why people fall for pseudoscience like biorhythms, iridology, and phrenology, or mysticism like astrology, numerology, and tarot cards.
David McRaney
#77. Religion is nothing but institutionalized mysticism. The catch is, mysticism does not lend itself to institutionalization. The moment we attempt to organize mysticism, we destroy its essence. Religion, then, is mysticism in which the mystical has been killed. Or, at least diminished.
Tom Robbins
#78. The comparative absence of biographical information about Hawksmoor provided a vacuum which Ackroyd and others were able to fill with myth and mysticism. Yet
Owen Hopkins
#79. Coelho is, of course, entitled to his dumb opinion, just as I am entitled to think Coelho's work is a nauseous broth of egomania and snake-oil mysticism with slightly less intellect, empathy and verbal dexterity than the week-old camembert I threw out yesterday.
Stuart Kelly
#80. Mysticism is in fact the only criticism people cannot level against my theory.
Albert Einstein
#81. When all the mysticism is stripped away, the people who comprise the government (the legislators, administrators, judges, and policemen), are guided by human interests, desires, beliefs, notions, and prejudices, just like other people. They have neither superhuman wisdom nor extraordinary virtue.
Hans F. Sennholz
#82. My religion is nature. That's what arouses those feelings of wonder and mysticism and gratitude in me.
Oliver Sacks
#83. For ... austere and gracious allegory, as for so much of its mysticism and its chivalry, its ardours and its endurances, the world is in debt to Spain.
Helen Waddell
#84. I like to say that I practice militant mysticism. I'm really absolutely sure of some things that I don't quite know.
Rob Bell
#85. As long as vitalism and spiritualism are open questions so long will the gateway of science be open to mysticism.
Rudolf Virchow
#86. The journey of consciousness, of mysticism, is to come to know yourself and your own motivations.
Caroline Myss
#87. I confess, that very different from you, I do find sometimes scientific inspiration in mysticism ... but this is counterbalanced by an immediate sense for mathematics.
Wolfgang Pauli
#88. God created hand, head, and heart; the hand for the deed, the head for the world, the heart for mysticism.
Abraham Kuyper
#89. Modern fanaticism thrives in proportion to the quanitity of contradictions and nonsense it poures down the throats of the gaping multitude, and the jargon and mysticism it offers to their wonder and credulity.
William Hazlitt
#90. I'm not trying to sign people up to a creed, I'm much more interested in the people that disagree. These ideas are powerful but this isn't mysticism in the ordinary sense to be protected by mumblings about faith and all that. This is the real thing.
Terence McKenna
#91. In mysticism we have to take all the imprinting that has occurred to us and wash it. Then we need to be re-imprinted but in a different way. Without it, we don't survive.
Frederick Lenz
#92. Where I grew up, there was a mysticism and creativity to everything. Everyone made things with their hands.
Shea Hembrey
#93. What I see in Nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of humility. This is a genuinely religious feeling that has nothing to do with mysticism.
Albert Einstein
#94. Mysticism is the study of power, its use, and its abuse. At every moment you are getting stronger or you are growing weaker. At every moment your attention field is increasing or decreasing.
Frederick Lenz
#96. I must confess that most modern mysticism seems to me to be simply a method of imparting useless knowledge in a form that no one can understand
Oscar Wilde
#97. The secret of mysticism, therefore, is to feel, think, speak, and act at the same time, for then all that is said, or felt, or done, becomes perfect.
Hazrat Inayat Khan
#98. I'll tell you what: I believe mysticism is a very serious endeavor. One must be equipped for it.
Elie Wiesel
#100. In my tradition, one must wait until one has learned a lot of Bible and Talmud and the Prophets to handle mysticism. This isn't instant coffee. There is no instant mysticism.
Elie Wiesel
