Ray Bradbury Quotes

It's that transformative nature of love and music and yoga that really inspires me.

I hope I'm a spiritual person. I'm trying to be a spiritual person.

I love being a scientologist, as it's helped me in every single aspect of my life.

The very purpose of religion is to control yourself, not to criticise others.

If I had my life to live over again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week.

If we expose kids to books and art, nothing but good can come from it.

It is possible to make each year bring with it a lasting gift to add to the fullness of experience, to be treasured up, savored, and remembered. They need not be startling, these gifts of the years; they may be things that lie within the reach of all.

What are your goals? Where are you going? Why are you here? What are you? Scientology has answers to these questions, good answers that are true, answers that work for you. For the subject matter of Scientology is you.

Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul.

Today, the sun is everywhere, and everything solid is nothing but its own shadow, I know that the real things in life, the things I remember, the things I turn over in my hands, are not houses, bank accounts, prizes or promotions. What I remember is love -- all love -- love of this dirt road, this sunrise, a day by the river, the stranger I met in a café. Myself, even, which is the hardest thing of all to love, because love and selfishness are not the same thing. It is easy to be selfish. It is hard to love who I am. No wonder I am surprised if you do.

When you sell a man a book you don't sell just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue - you sell him a whole new life. Love and friendship and humour and ships at sea by night - there's all heaven and earth in a book, a real book.

Some people act as if it were demeaning to their manhood to wish to be well-read but you can no more be a healthy person mentally without reading substantial books than you can be a vigorous person physically without eating solid food. Books should be chosen, not for their freedom from evil, but for their possession of good. Dr. Johnson said: "Whilst you stand deliberating which book your son shall read first, another boy has read both."

If I am not today all that I hope to be, yet I see Jesus, and that assures me that I shall one day be like Him.

Books console us, calm us, prepare us, enrich us and redeem us.

Good books are as friends, willing to give to us if we are willing to make a little effort.

When we start helping the weak and the poor to rise everyone will begin to change. Those who have power and riches will start to become more humble, and those who are rising up will leave behind their need to be victims, their need to be angry or depressed....This is the spirituality of life, that helps people to rise up and take their place. It is not a spirituality of death. Jesus wants those who have been crushed to rise up and those who have power to discover that there is another road, a road of sharing and compassion.

Never trample on any soul though it may be lying in the veriest mire; for that last spark of self-respect is its only hope, its only chance; the last seed of a new and better life: the voice of God that whispers to it: "You are not what you ought to be, and you are not what you can be. You are still God's child, still an immortal soul. You may rise yet. and fight a good fight yet, and be a man once more, after the likeness of God who made you, and Christ who died for you!

I pray daily, not for more riches, but for more wisdom with which to recognize, embrace and enjoy what I already possess.

People who want to rise above a well-cooked meal and a well-tailored garment, are out of their spiritual minds.

Do you need strength? Peace? Wisdom? Direction? Discipline? Ask for it! God will hear you.

If you would attain to your highest, go look upon a flower;what the flower does willessly, that do willingly.

Why do we marry, why take friends and lovers? Why give ourselves to music, painting, chemistry or cooking? Out of simple delight in the resident goodness of creation, of course; but out of more than that, too. Half earth's gorgeousness lies hidden in the glimpsed city it longs to become.

Today I set my mind and heart on a new path. I focus my energy on love, appreciation, and my highest possibilities.

I have done my best. That is about all the philosophy of living one needs.

Our lives are greatly enriched when we immerse ourselves in literature and spiritual writing, not because we are going to be tested but purely for the sake of enrichment.