Pierre de Coubertin Quotes

I think there's a reason why wine figures into so many religions. There's something transcendent about it. It's sort of the way that music is more than the sum of its parts. You have all these elements that make up the terroir that wine can communicate.

With the advance of knowledge, therefore, prayer and sacrifice assume the leading place in religious ritual; and magic; which once ranked with them as a legitimate equal, is gradually relegated to the background and sinks to the level of a black art.

We think of religion as the symbolic expression of our highest moral ideals; we think of magic as a crude aggregate of superstitions. Religious belief seems to become mere superstitious credulity if we admit any relationship with magic. On the other hand our anthropological and ethnographical material makes it extremely difficult to separate the two fields.

Art is what remains of religion: the dance above the yawning abyss.

I don't think there is any religious revival. I think what we are hearing, the furor, is merely the hysterical response of the churches the handwriting on the wall that they are seeing.

To be religious is to be sensitive to reality.

If you tell people you talk to God, they'll think you're religious, but if you say God talks to you, it's ten to one they'll think you're crazy.

Wherever we are, God's in that moment, God's speaking to us, and if we've just got our ears open and our antennas up, there's no lack of inspiration. He's not silent. We just have to be listening.

What it takes to reach this place I'm speaking about is to be in spirit. You shift who you are away from what you have, what you do, what your reputation is, what people think of you, and all of that ego-based thinking. You shift into the understanding that who you are is a piece of God - who you are is a piece of the source - and when you stay connected to that in your thoughts you inspire others to do the same.

I think religion is often very different from spirituality. Religion is often about rules and people trying to control our lives who are actually very unspiritual... God can be found anywhere, and in fact, everywhere. And you don

The closer you live to God, the smaller everything else appears.

Think often on God, by day, by night, in your business and even in your diversions. He is always near you and with you; leave him not alone.

I think Balanchine and Robbins talk to God and when I call, he's out to lunch.

The soul of God is poured into the world through the thoughts of men.

The highest condition of the religious sentiment is when. . . the worshiper not only sees God everywhere, but sees nothing which is not full of God.

It feels like God visits everywhere else, but lives in Africa.

Normally, we think of the religious as people who care more, not less than the rest of us. This is not true, not exactly. The truly religious care more deeply about fewer things and do't give a hoot about the rest.

So when I feel the spirit upon me it's something I don't take it for granted, and I don't think I'm solely responsible for these things.

I think this is how we are supposed to be in the world-present and in awe.

Worship is God's way of giving us an opportunity to shift our focus from our own concerns, problems, and circumstances to the way things are in heaven.

These [religious ideas] are given out as teachings, are not precipitates of experience or end-results of thinking: they are illusions, fullfilments of the oldest, strongest and most urgent wishes of mankind.

I think the main thing that we have to do is try and train ourselves to remember from moment to moment that God is living within us and within everybody else, and just trying to remember to see that.

It does not follow, because our ancestors made so many errors of fact and mixed them with their religion, that we should therefore leave off being religious at all. By being religious we establish ourselves in possession of ultimate reality at the only points at which reality is given us to guard. Our responsible concern is with our private destiny, after all.

When we conceive a new idea we are thinking directly from the creativity of God.

To the Indian mind there is nothing higher than religious ideals, that this is the keynote of Indian life.