David Rakoff Quotes

It's important to me that I don't get trapped in the whole teen scene, because I feel that you can get lost in those kind of movies, and they aren't really about the actors; they're about the selling of the concept, and how much money it makes.

We Americans commercialize everything. Look at what we did to Christmas. Christmas is Jesus' birthday. Now, I don't know Jesus, but from what I read he was the least materialistic person who ever walked the earth. No bling on Jesus. He kept a low profile and we turned his birthday into the most commercial day of the year. In fact we have a whole Jesus birthday season. And then at the end of it, we have the nerve to have an economist come on TV and say what a horrible Jesus birthday season we had.

Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some of them woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.

Yoga in Mayfair or Fifth Avenue, or in any other place which is on the telephone, is a spiritual fake.

rummaging in the storehouses of religious or literary history for myth-matter for ideational uses is of the nature of spiritual vulgarity.

Science, art, learning and metaphysical research all have their proper functions in life, but if you seek to blend them, you destroy their individual characteristics until, in time, you eliminate the spiritual, for instance, from the religious altogether.

I Am More Spiritual Than Religious; Besides I Am Not A Fanatic

I think of myself as a highly spiritual person, but without - I was never really given a religion or a religious experience or a community to sort of subscribe to.

My idea of storytelling is - I wouldn't say it's religious but I would say it's spiritual. You know, the chemist Friedrich August Kekule worked for twenty years trying to figure out the structure of the benzene ring, and he couldn't do it. And then one night he was sleeping and he had a vision of a snake swallowing its tail. So he told his students about it and they said, 'Not bad, you go to sleep and you wake up with that.' And he said, 'Visions come to prepared spirits.' The way Billy Wilder put it was 'The muse has to know where to find you.'

I consider myself more spiritual than religious.

Lives with no more sense of spiritual meaning than that provided by shopping malls, ordinary television, and stagnant workplaces are barren lives indeed. Spirituality enriches culture.

I really don't know why people have so much trouble now writing about religious faith. It is true that clichés can override more interesting impulses. But the desire to find meaning, to be generous, to live well in an ethical and spiritual sense, is so widespread that it should not seem alien to people when it is expressed in the terms of traditional religion.

American Jews, like Americans, have a very consumerist attitude toward their identity: they pick and choose the bits of this and that they like.

The universe is large and we are tiny, without the need for further religious superstructure. One can have so-called spiritual moments without belief in the spirit.

How can we find spiritual meaning in a scientific worldview? Spirituality is a way of being in the world, a sense of one’s place in the cosmos, a relationship to that which extends beyond oneself. . . . Does scientific explanation of the world diminish its spiritual beauty? I think not. Science and spirituality are complementary, not conflicting; additive, not detractive. Anything that generates a sense of awe may be a source of spirituality. Science does this in spades. (158-159)

I got to a point where kind of a oneness with everything and a great compassion. It teaches you compassion. It was a great, enlightening experience, a spiritual experience. Not particularly religious, but spiritual. It was great. I can still go there.

I am a deeply religious person, but I belong to no denomination. I follow the spirit of God's law, not the letter of the law. One can become so attached to the outward symbols and structure of religion that one forgets its original intent - to bring one closer to God. We can only gain access to the Kingdom of God by realizing it dwells within us as well as in all humanity. Know that we are all cells in the ocean of infinity, each contributing to the others' welfare.

The historian Arthur Schlesinger has pointed out that people tend to get interested in politics again every 30 years. The universe moves in cycles of three. The number figures in everything from Pythagoras's theory that the universe is based on three to the Father-the-Son-and-the-Holy- Ghost to the three-sided pyramidal shapes that intersect in the Jewish Star of David. The notion of the mystical three, metaphysically, spiritually, and even politically, is quite interesting to me.

I now consider myself quite religious and spiritual although that sounds like a terrible cliche.

A solemn and religious regard to spiritual and eternal things is an indispensable element of all true greatness.

Music goes way back before language does. And music is like the key to a whole spiritual existence which this society doesn't even talk about. We know it's there. The Grateful Dead plays at religious services essentially. We play at the religious services of the new age. Everybody gets high, and that's what it's all about really. Getting high is a lot more real than listening to a politician. You can think that getting high actually did happen - that you danced, and got sweaty, and carried on. It really did happen. I know when it happens. I know it when it happens every time.

To accept yourself wherever. you are.... And don't think in terms of competition! You need not be anywhere else. Wherever you are, if you can be happy there, you have become religious, you have become spiritual. Spirituality knows no competition, spirituality knows no greed, spirituality knows no ambition - because spirituality means desirelessness.

The forces, movements, and energies that today we call religious, spiritual, or faith-based have related through the ages in diverse ways to the spheres of life that today we call economic and that we see embodied in business and commerce.

What is any religion? A little ritual, a little superstition, and some magic. It's not a strictly spiritual affair; it has psychological roles to fulfill. You might not want it to be a religion based on your own experience but that's like wanting to clean up your dreams

I think commercialism helps Christmas and I think that the more capitalism we can inject into the Christmas holiday the more spiritual I feel about it