Robert Penn Warren Quotes

Sitting alone, listening to the sound of your breath, the beating of your heart is a reminder that you are sacred and blessed.

It is when people do not allow God to show up through them ... that the world collapses in on itself.

God and Nature met in light.

There's a hidden sweetness in the stomach's emptiness. We are lutes, no more, no less. If the soundbox is stuffed full of anything, no music.... When you're full of food and drink, Satan sits where your spirit should.

To have a friendship with God, all I really have to do is have a friendship with my Self.

Get yourself empty in the Eastern sense. Not in the Western sense. In the Western sense when we feel empty we feel lonely, miserable, but in the Eastern sense - "I'm so empty, because I'm filled with everything, and I'm connected to everything." It's very energizing. You want that kind of emptiness, whatever you have to do to get yourself quiet.

Silence is the only language god speaks.

I love being outside with trees and water, lying down somewhere or walking. I do transcendental meditation, which keeps me calm and steady.

... religious experience, as we have studied it, cannot be cited as unequivocally supporting the infinitist belief. The only thingthat it unequivocally testifies to is that we can experience union with something larger than ourselves and in that union find our greatest peace.

Before there can be fullness there must be emptiness. Before God can fill us with Himself we must first be emptied of ourselves.

We've fallen for the devil's lie. His most basic strategy, the same one he employed with Adam and Eve, is to make us believe that sin brings fulfillment. However, in reality, sin robs us of fulfillment. Sin doesn't make life interesting; it makes life empty. Sin doesn't create adventure; it blunts it. Sin doesn't expand life; it shrinks it. Sin's emptiness inevitably leads to boredom. When there's fulfillment, when there's beauty, when we see God as he truly is-an endless reservoir of fascination-boredom becomes impossible.

When the eyes of the soul looking out meet the eyes of God looking in, heaven has begun right here on earth.

I live in the spirit of prayer. I pray as I walk about, when I lie down and when I rise up. And the answers are always coming.

Again, our marriage problems are not really marriage problems. They are heart problems. They are God problems. Our lack of intimacy with God causes a void that we try to fill with the frailest of substitutes. Like wealth or pleasure. Like fame or respect. Like people. Like marriage.

One who truly meets the world goes out also to God.

Your hands may be full of money and your brain full of information but if your heart is empty, your life is very empty.

Most spiritual experiences begin with suffering. They begin with groundlessness. They begin when the rug has been pulled out from under us.

So when we sing, 'Draw me nearer, nearer, blessed Lord,' we are not thinking of the nearness of place, but of the nearness of relationship. It is for increasing degrees of awareness that we pray, for a more perfect consciousness of the divine Presence. We need never shout across the spaces to an absent God. He is nearer than our own soul, closer than our most secret thoughts.

As for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great, that I look and do not see, — Listen and do not hear — the tongue moves but does not speak … I want you to pray for me — that I let Him have free hand.

Do not seek God in outer space-- Your heart is the only place in which to meet Him face to face.

I turned to speak to God About the world's despair But to make bad matters worse I found God wasn't there.

Healthy mysticism praises acts of letting go, of being emptied, of getting in touch with the space inside and expanding this until it merges with the space outside. Space meeting space; empty pouring into empty. Births happen from that encounter with emptiness, nothingness. . . . Let us not fight emptiness and nothingness, but allow it to penetrate us even as we penetrate it.

From the beginning, I've stressed that home is something internal, invisible, portable, especially for those of us with roots in many physical places; we have to root ourselves in our passions, our values and our deepest friends. My home, I've always felt, lies in the songs and novels that I love, in the wife and mother that I'm never far away from, in the monastery to which I've been returning for 25 years.

Secularism produces a bored soul