Top 100 Quotes About Mystics
#1. Most mystics do not want to read religious wisdom; they want to be it. A postcard of a beautiful lake is not a beautiful lake, and Sufis may be defined as those who dance in the lake.
Huston Smith
#2. Christian literature makes reference to many episodes that parallel the experiences of those going a yogic way. Saint Anthony, one of the first desert mystics, frequently encountered strange and sometimes terrifying psychophysical forces while at prayer.
Willigis Jager
#3. There are no defenders of man's mind - in the world's greatest scientific-technological civilization. All that is left is a battle between the mystics of spirit and the mystics of muscle - between men guided by their feelings and men guided by their reflexes.
Ayn Rand
#4. Religions are founded by what mystics say when they come back;
but what the mystics say is not the same as what happened to them.
Ram Dass
#5. My house was a guest house of many Jaina saints, Hindu monks, Sufi mystics, because my grandfather was interested in all of these people.
Rajneesh
#6. It's the strange thing about you mystics, how often your little ecstasies wear a skirt.
John Updike
#7. The medieval mystics say the true image and the true real met once and for all on the cross: once and for all: and yet they still meet daily.
Madeleine L'Engle
#8. Osho is one of India's greatest mystics ... I see him as one of the world's great teachers, thinkers, philosophers and guides of our times. I have enormous respect for his world vision and the kind of International Communities he is building. I have always felt his influence in my life.
Kabir Bedi
#9. That Religion is not devotion, but work and suffering for the love of God; this is the true doctrine of Mystics.
Florence Nightingale
#10. Mystics exult in mystery and want it to stay mysterious. Scientists exult in mystery for a different reason: It gives them something to do.
Richard Dawkins
#11. What everyone forgets is that passion is not merely a heightened sensual fusion but a way of life which produces, as in the mystics, an ecstatic awareness of the whole of life.
Anais Nin
#12. Mystics always hope that science will some day overtake them.
Booth Tarkington
#13. Many are the thyrsus-bearers, but few are the mystics.
Plato
#14. Ruefully admitting we can neither remain children nor all become artists still less saints and mystics, we turn back, regretfully, but massively, to the time-ridden world.
Alan McGlashan
#15. A religion without mystics is a philosophy.
Quintilian
#16. 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
#17. One of the keystones of romantic love - and also of the ecstatic religion practiced by mystics - is the powerful desire to become one with the beloved.
Diane Ackerman
#18. Make no mistake about the character of mystics. To undercut your consciousness has always been their only purpose throughout the ages - and power, the power to rule you by force, has always been their only lust (John Galt)
Ayn Rand
#19. What Nietzsche is describing is a kind of transcendence - a mental state of complete and utter absorption well known to artists, athletes, gamblers, musicians, dancers, soldiers in battle, mystics, meditators, and the devout during prayer.
Michael Pollan
#20. For the Christian mystics, detachment meant to leave attachment so that God could enter you and take over completely and you could climb the ladder to their heaven. Kind of crazy, but what the hell?
Gerald Stern
#21. The difference between poets and mystics ... The mystic nails a symbol to one meaning that was true for a moment but soon becomes false. The poet, on the other hand, sees that truth while it's true but understands that symbols are always in flux and that their meanings are fleeting.
Neal Stephenson
#23. Mystics throughout the world have spoken of the inner experience of unity with the Self, a reality defined in our language by the Sanskrit term yoga, meaning union, and the word "religion", which comes from the Latin religare, meaning to bind or link.
Gwenael Verez
#24. In the post-Christian world, all Christians will be mystics.
Karl Rahner
#25. Eager souls, mystics and revolutionaries, may propose to refashion the world in accordance with their dreams; but evil remains, and so long as it lurks in the secret places of the heart, utopia is only the shadow of a dream
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#26. The great and rare mystics of the past ... were, in fact, ahead of their time, and are still ahead of ours. In other words, they most definitely are not figures of the past. They are figures of the future.
Ken Wilber
#27. Unless we proceed cautiously, there might well arise a few generations of mystics who conceive of the orgone metaphysically, divorced from non-living nature and who do not comprehend it from the standpoint of natural science. And it seems to me that we have more than enough mysticism as it is.
Wilhelm Reich
#28. I like to say I don't believe in mystics . I don't believe in fate. I don't believe in destiny or kismet. I don't believe in God. I don't believe in anything. But I believe in the possibility of everything.
Tiffanie DeBartolo
#29. I've deliberately studied many things that I know, going in, I won't be able to assimilate. I read Plato, St. Thomas, the mystics, to exercise my mind.
Don Ameche
#30. Huxley suggests that the reason there aren't nearly as many mystics and visionaries walking around today, as compared to the Middle Ages, is the improvement in nutrition. Vitamin deficiencies wreak havoc on brain function and probably explain a large portion of visionary experiences in the past.
Michael Pollan
#31. The Alexandrian Mystics' emphasis on silent prayer gave their teachings interior depth missing from Western theology today.
Amos Smith
#32. The people fancy they hate poetry, and they are all poets and mystics.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#33. All these mystics, throughout history, all over the world, they all found their way to enlightenment by physical suffering.
Chuck Palahniuk
#34. What has to be given up is not the I, as most mystics suppose: this I is indispensable for any relationship, including the highest, which always presupposes an I and You.
Martin Buber
#35. Untrained minds have always been a nuisance to the military police of orthodoxy. God-intoxicated mystics and untidy saints with only a white blaze of divine love where their minds should have been, are perpetually creating almost as much disorder within the law as outside it.
Katherine Anne Porter
#36. If the 'Mystics' were about Isolation..Purity about 'White'..Hermits about 'Rags' and Love about 'Self'...
There is tons above and beyond the visible!!
Abha Maryada Banerjee
#37. Zoe let the poetry flow over her, like shadows on water, sunlight against stone: timeworn words shaped like stars, like shells, like the ruins of lost temples, soft as the breaths of mystics.
Christine Brodien-Jones
#38. If you study the writings of the mystics, you will always find things in them that appear to be paradoxes, as in Zen, particularly.
Alan Watts
#39. To illustrate: Everybody in the world knows the word "God," but there are few people in the world who know God. For most of us God has remained a word, a term, a power outside the self; God, Itself, has not become a living reality except to those few people who are known as mystics.
Joel S. Goldsmith
#40. He was still undecided. It depended on how you thought of God. If God is nature, then God doesn't care, since nature doesn't care. But if, as the mystics understood, God is the best of man and within man, then God cares, since man does.
Pearl Abraham
#41. Find the god in your own heart and you will understand by direct intuition what all the great teachers, real mystics, true philosophers and inspired people have been trying to tell you by the tortuous method of using words.
Paul Brunton
#42. That is my essential reason for writing, not for fame, not to be celebrated after death, but to heighten and create life all around me. I also write because when I am writing I reach the high moment of fusion sought by the mystics, the poets, the lovers, a sense of communion with the universe.
Anais Nin
#43. For centuries, cultures throughout the world have used indigenous technologies to navigate life's complexities. From navigator-priests in Micronesia to mystics in India, vast sums of knowledge are available if we but recognize it.
Elizabeth Kapu'uwailani Lindsey
#44. The mystics and the churchmen talk about throwing off his body and its desires, being no longer a slave to the flesh. They don't say that through the flesh we are set free. That our desire for another will lift us out of ourselves more cleanly than anything divine.
Jeanette Winterson
#45. The mystics and their "collected works." When one addresses oneself to God, and to God alone, as they claim to do, one should be careful not to write. God doesn't read ...
Emil Cioran
#46. The Founding Fathers were neither passive, death-worshipin g mystics nor mindless, power-seeking looters; as a political group they were a phenomenon unprecedented in history: they were thinkers who were also men of action.
Ayn Rand
#47. Mystics are all a bit funny in the head anyway," the priest added cynically, "which is why the church locks them all up in mental hospitals and euphemistically calls these institutions monasteries.
Robert Anton Wilson
#48. The mystics will tell you death is perfectly safe. A violent act will beget a violent act; it is simply a law.
Tom Shadyac
#49. I belong to the scarce minority of artists who work in good faith, around whom the phenomenal world vanishes, as it happens to the mystics when they give themselves to prayer.
Andres Segovia
#50. Those who find ecstasy do so not by visiting the shrines of civilization but by trudging in the swamps of human destitution and misery. Our literature of ecstasy recounts the dark nights of the soul and encounters with mystics in the slums and in the refugee camps of genocidal wars.
Alphonso Lingis
#51. Lovers and mystics are familiar with this sense of grandeur, this taste of joy - in abandoning oneself to the will of others.
Anne Desclos
#52. The true, or higher part of the self is always seeking the state that mystics talk about, the state in which we are filled with a universal love and a peaceful euphoria.
James Redfield
#53. It often horrified the English community that she spent her time with local farmers and horse traders, eccentrics and mystics, but she valued expertise over convention and had long believed if you were going to make discoveries in the world you must first quit your Englishness and open your eyes.
Sara Sheridan
#54. Nirvana is something within you. It is not an external reality. No god thunders down from the mountaintop. Just as the great mystics in the Christian, Jewish and Muslim faiths all discovered, God is within the self. God is virtually inseparable from ourselves.
Karen Armstrong
#55. And if California slides into the ocean, as the mystics and statistics say it will, I predict this hotel will be standing until I've paid my bill.
Warren Zevon
#56. Most of the great books on prayer are written by 'experts' - monks, missionaries, mystics, saints. I've read scores of them, and mainly they make me feel guilty.
Philip Yancey
#57. When we're interested in something, everything around us appears to refer to it (the mystics call these phenomena 'signs', the sceptics 'coincidence', and psychologists 'concentrated focus', although I've yet to find out what term historians would use).
Paulo Coelho
#58. It was at Long Huruk that we encountered the vortex of the dream time of which we had so far only touched the periphery, for this was the semi-nomadic community of mystics and dream wanderers.
Lawrence Blair
#59. Whenever the essential nature of things is analysed by the intellect, it must seem absurd or paradoxical. This has always been recognized by the mystics, but has become a problem in science only very recently.
Fritjof Capra
#60. There's a rich legend of this in other cultures, this speaking with ancestors. The Christian mystics communicated with angels.
James Redfield
#61. The Sufis, like all mystics, are singers of a homesickness that is a kind of hope; all of us are exiles in the world, they tell us, longing to get back to the place that is our rightful home.
Pico Iyer
#62. 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
#63. Scientists willing to risk their reputations on higher dimensions soon found themselves ridiculed by the scientific community. Higher-dimensional space became the last refuge for mystics, cranks, and charlatans.
Michio Kaku
#64. The Alexandrian Mystics taught that Jesus' divinity with a capital D and his humanity with a lower case h are always in dynamic tension and can never be separated.
Amos Smith
#65. Saints and mystics, revelations, origin myths, and heroes' journeys, as well as ethical and spiritual guidelines, speak to us from ancient times and far-flung lands and peoples.
Sandra Harner
#66. Transformation of any kind always exacts a holy tussle. The newborn butterfly struggles to open its wings so it can conjure up the strength to fly. So, too, with artists, inventors, mystics, and entrepreneurs.
Tama J. Kieves
#67. Theologians may quarrel, but the mystics of the world speak the same language.
Meister Eckhart
#68. The conception of Godhead formed by some devout philosophers and mystics has quite rightly been so immeasurably vast, though still assuredly utterly inadequate and necessarily beneath reality, that the notion of a God revealed in human formborn, sufferin.
Oliver Lodge
#69. Artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach.
Sol LeWitt
#70. However much I have frequented the mystics, deep down I have always sided with the Devil; unable to equal him in power, I have tried to be worthy of him, at least, in insolence, acrimony, arbitrariness, and caprice.
Emil Cioran
#71. All mystics have had psychotic breakdowns, although not all psychotics are mystics.
James Curcio
#72. The mystics ask you to take nothing on mere belief. Rather, they give you a set of experiments to test in your own awareness and experience. The laboratory is your own mind, the experiment is meditation.
Ken Wilber
#73. You keep insisting, I feel good because the world is right! Wrong! The world is right because I feel good. That's what all the mystics are saying.
Anthony De Mello
#74. Prophets, mystics, poets, scientific discoverers are men whose lives are dominated by a vision; they are essentially solitary men ... whose thoughts and emotions are not subject to the dominion of the herd.
Bertrand Russell
#75. 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
#76. I despise mystics, they fancy themselves so deep, when they aren't even superficial.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#77. There are two kinds of courage: the courage that holds things together and the courage that throws them away. The first is more common; it is the cement of civilization; it is Lucy's. The second is the courage of drunks and suicides and mystics.
Douglas Glover
#78. Here we part from the "nature mystics," the mystic poets, and all who shared in and were contented with the illuminated vision of reality. Those who go on are the great and strong spirits, who do not seek to know, but are driven to be.
Evelyn Underhill
#79. Pride is no respecter of persons. The serious thinkers may be humble, and the careless mystics may be arrogant.
John Piper
#80. Creativity and spirituality function on the same side of the brain. If that is true, it is quite reasonable and natural for them to function together. The prophets and mystics we're obviously aware of this connection. p. 23.
David Brazzeal
#81. The discovery of the Square was a great event to the primitive mystics of the Nile. Very early it became an emblem of truth, justice, and righteousness, and it remains to this day through unaccountable ages have passed.
Joseph Fort Newton
#82. Quantum mechanics, that brilliantly successful flagship theory of modern science, is deeply mysterious and hard to understand. Eastern mystics have always been deeply mysterious and hard to understand. Therefore, Eastern mystics must have been talking about quantum theory all along.
Richard Dawkins
#83. When one turns from reason to faith, when one rejects the absolutism of reality, one undercuts the absolutism of one's consciousness - and one's mind becomes an organ one cannot trust any longer. It becomes what the mystics claim it to be: a tool of distortion.
Ayn Rand
#84. Saints and mystics throughout history have adorned their realisations with different names and given them different faces and interpretations, but what they are all fundamentally experiencing is the essential nature of the mind.
Sogyal Rinpoche
#85. Science has now confirmed what philosophers, mystics, and other intuitive people have long declared: every human being has been literally "engineered for success" by his Creator. Every human being has access to a power greater than himself.
Maxwell Maltz
#86. There are mystics who are said to have experienced God directly. He was a mystic,too,and what he had experienced was vacancy-a complete certainty in the existence of a dying, cooling world, of human beings who had evolved from animals for no prose at all. He knew.
Graham Greene
#87. Mystics were about as common as two-headed unicorns. The few who existed lived apart from the world of men, remaining untainted by influence and corruption. Having a wolf as her best friend demonstrated the sort of wisdom he appreciated.
Michael J. Sullivan
#88. The tendency of our time is wholly oriented toward the secular. The efforts of the mystics will remain episodes. Despite a deepening of our conceptions of life, we will build no cathedrals.
Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe
#89. She leaned forward and kissed me on the lips. He mouth was cold, her lips rough from the winter wind, and if the mystics are right and we are doomed to repeat our squalid lives ad infinitum, at least I will always return to that kiss
David Benioff
#90. Therefore it is the law of the mystics to see all things, to experience all things, either of heaven or earth, and yet to say little; for the souls incapable of understanding the possibility of their reach will ridicule them.
Hazrat Inayat Khan
#91. The mystics are the only ones who have gained a glimpse into what is possible when this same capacity [for creation] is used primarily in the service of the individual himself instead of for the creation of art.
Beatrice M. Hinkle
#92. Like all mystics (and many novelists, not least the present one) he is baffled, a child, before the real now; far happier out of it, in a narrative past or a prophetic future, locked inside that weird tence grammar does not allow, the imaginary present.
John Fowles
#93. The highest Hindu intellectual training was based on the practice of yoga, and produced, as its fruit, those marvellous philosophical systems, the six Darshanas and the Brahma Sutras, which are still the delight of scholars and the inspiration of occultists and mystics.
Annie Besant
#94. I have seen the mystics play there Once or twice but I knew they had a reason Enchantment plays it's cards all right Hand in hand with the working of the seasons Legends can be now and forever Teaching us to love for goodness sake Legends can be now and forever Loved by the sun, loved by the sun
Jon Anderson
#95. I do not think reading the mystics would hurt you myself: you say you must avoid books which deal with 'feelings' - but the mystics don't deal with feelings but with love which is a very different thing. You have too many 'feelings,' but not nearly enough love.
Evelyn Underhill
#96. Every period ruled by mystics was an era of stagnation and want, when most men were on strike against existence,
Ayn Rand
#97. Our destiny is to be so intimately united with God that, as the mystics say, we not only see God's face but also see with God's face.
Peter Kreeft
#98. When you come to a place where you have to left or right,' says Sister Ruth, 'go straight ahead.
Kathleen Norris
#99. It is knowledge that binds us; shared wisdom from ages past and new wisdom that we should all seek to embrace. Wisdom is our legacy; our refuge from the world of the ignorant and foolish. We chose this path that we might walk open-eyed into the future... undaunted by fear and lies.
Ted Naifeh
#100. Theology at its best doesn't seek to solve, but to behold.
Amos Smith
