Mary Doria Russell Quotes

I say to mankind, Be not curious about God. For I, who am curious about each, am not curious about God - I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least.

Sometimes we stand to learn the most about God from the situations we understand the least.

Christianity seems at first to be all about morality, all about duties and rules and guilt and virtue, yet it leads you on, out of all that, into something beyond. One has a glimpse of a country where they do not talk of those things, except perhaps as a joke. Every one there is filled full with what we should call goodness as a mirror is filled with light. But they do not call it goodness. They do not call it anything. They are not thinking of it. They are too busy looking at the source from which it comes.

You can know a lot about God and godliness and still not know God.

Genuine transcendence doesn't just look away from human suffering and say, "I am at peace, so I'm at the mountaintop." Genuine transcendence looks human suffering in the eye and attains peace because of a faith in things unseen.

It is when we love the other, the enemy, that we obtain from God the key to an understanding of who He is, and who we are.

The Jewish sages also tell us that God dances when His children defeat Him in argument, when they stand on their feet and use their minds. So questions like Anne's are worth asking. To ask them is a very fine kind of human behavior. If we keep demanding that God yield up His answers, perhaps some day we will understand them. And then we will be something more than clever apes, and we shall dance with God.

We look upon prayer simply as a means of getting things for ourselves, but the biblical purpose of prayer is that we may get to know God Himself.

Religion is consciousness-raising. It raises you higher than the problem, it gives you a bird's-eye view.

To find love I must enter into the sanctuary where it is hidden, which is the mystery of God.

It's only by forgetting yourself that you draw near to God.

Faith is not belief, it is the grasp on the Ultimate, an illumination.

If I immerse myself in the scriptures...I find myself loving more intensely those whom I must love with all my heart and mind and strength, and loving them more. I find it easier to abide their counsel.

I would rather a thousand times be five minutes at the feet of Christ than listen a lifetime to all the wise men in the world.

The stream of praying cannot rise higher than the fountain of living.

You cannot hold God hostage (to your questions). He doesn’t owe you an answer. If you want the peace that passes understanding, you’re going to have to give up your right to understanding. It’s called trust.

The joy of the presence of Jesus, you must be able to give wherever you go. But you cannot give what you don't have. That's why you need a pure heart, a pure heart that you will receive as a fruit of your prayer, as a fruit of your oneness with Christ.

Faith induces one to pray.Prayer purifies the heart.In the purified heart is reflected the light of Lord.When the Light sighns the mortal becomes immortal.

A religious belief is not a statement about Reality, but a hint, a clue about something that is a mystery, beyond the grasp of human thought. In short, a religious belief is only a finger pointing to the moon. Some religious people never get beyond the study of the finger. Others are engaged in sucking it. Others yet use the finger to gouge their eyes out. These are the bigots whom religion has made blind. Rare indeed is the religionist who is sufficiently detached from the finger to see what it is indicating - these are those who, having gone beyond belief, are taken for blasphemers.

I'm a spiritual person, I believe that if you read the bible, you get what you want from it. But, when you actually read it, you see the beauty, spirituality, the joy and love and what makes us godly. And then if you read between the lines of all the same books, you always see the human influence in the writing... it's not all about religiousness, it's about spirituality.

Trials help us detach ourselves from the earth; they make us look higher than this world.

God does not exist to answer our prayers, but by our prayers we come to discern the mind of God.

One way you can get really close to God is to sin as hard as you can.

"I do not want to get material life, do not want the sense-life, but something higher." That is renunciation. Then, by the power of meditation, undo the mischief that has been done.

The world is not impermanent if one lives there after knowing God.