Mahershala Ali Quotes

I was an atheist, I was open-minded, and I began to read in that direction, in the direction of Islam, and everything that I read about it appealed to me.

I was born with a serious spiritual consciousness and for many years studied different paths.

When I started law school in 2010, I would have called myself an atheist. When I graduated law school in 2013, I was exploring my faith again. A lot changed in those three years.

I even went so far as to become a Southern Baptist for a while, until I realized that they didn't hold 'em under long enough.

In 2003, as a 21-year-old convert to Islam, I moved from Colorado to Cairo to see what life was like in a Muslim country.

I wasn't brought up with any religion at all. At school and in my early 20s, I read every religious text I could get my hands on - Buddhist scriptures, Hindu texts, the Qur'an, and the Bible. I wanted to feel like something made sense to me, that there was something sacred I could feel aligned with.

I went to church when I was younger, but it was never something pushed down my throat or anything, which is a good thing. I found out for myself where I belonged.

My mom and my aunties are really devout Christians. My mom married a Muslim when I was 12, so I got teachings from both sides and then other sides because I wanted to find out which way to go. So not only Christianity and Islam, but Confucianism, Shintoism, Taoism, Buddhism, and Judaism. I tried to read everything.

The fact that I didn't believe in God was something that I just didn't consider. And then when I did, it was like, 'Oh yeah, I'm out.'

As a Westerner, the child of civil rights and anti-war activists, I embraced Islam not in abandonment of my core values, drawn almost entirely from the progressive tradition, but as an affirmation of them.

Then she had been a fiancee, a young wife, and a mother, and she had discovered that these words were far too small ever to contain the experience.

We all have views on what our Irishness means to us. Two members of the band were born in England and were raised in the Protestant faith. Bono's mother was Protestant and his father was Catholic. I was brought up Catholic. U2 are a living example of the kind of unity of faith and tradition that is possible in Northern Ireland.

God said to Abraham: "Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house, unto the land that I will show thee." God says to man: "First, get you out of your country, that means the dimness you have inflicted on yourself. Then out of your birthplace, that means out of the dimness your mother inflicted on you. After that, out of the house of your father, that means out of the dimness your father inflicted on you. Only then will you be able to go to the land that I will show you"

I was looking for something within Judaism that had a spiritual nature and not just a religious nature. So my trainer at the time was the one who took me to the Kabbalah center on my 40th birthday. I was like, "Oh, this is so cool." I was just ready for it. I was ready for something different.

I grow old, I grow old, the center will not fold. In youth I had hardening of the categories and looked for the father and the mother in every lover. Then I cracked. Then I fragmented. Then the old man in my soul found the god in herself, not in some Jungian fairy tale but in the flesh that fell from the bones and the words that came into my mouth when the look went out of their eyes.

I did not grow up in the church. I'm not a church-goer now. I'm a very spiritual person.

Yoga is not just about living better. It is about exploring the very source of life.

I grew up in a family in which there was very little religion. My father wasn't religious at all. But he was really interested in the subject of, you know, the birth and growth of Islam. And he basically transmitted that interest to me.

Jews took it very seriously to marry other Jews and repopulate the Jewish bloodline, and my father's generation gets very serious in my household when they're like, "You have to marry another Jew," because that's still kind of the mentality coming from the baby boomers. So I know that type of pressure.

You will never understand who you are until you understand who God is.

You create a path of your own by looking within yourself and listening to your soul, cultivating your own ways of experiencing the sacred and then practicing it. Practicing until you make it a song that sings you.

It's always seemed to me that black people's grace has been with what they do with language. In Lorrain, Ohio, when I was a child, I went to school with and heard the stories of Mexicans, Italians, and Greeks, and I listened. I remember their language, and a lot of it is marvelous. But when I think of things my mother or father or aunts used to say, it seems the most absolutely striking thing in the world.

In order to purify yourself, you have to understand yourself, Father Trais went on. Everything out in the world is also in you. Good, bad, evil, perfection, death, everything. So we study our souls.

I've got a lot of back-up because my father was a Catholic, my mother was a Protestant, I was educated by Jews and I'm married to a Muslim. So I won't lose out on a technicality.

But for the first time, I had a religious identity. I had come home. And so I called myself a Zen Buddhist at the age of 18.