Elizabeth Gilbert Quotes

There were now and then, though rarely, the hours that brought the welcome shock, pulled down the walls and brought me back again from my wanderings to the living heart of the world. Sadly and yet deeply moved, I set myself to recall the last of these experiences. It was at a concert of lovely old music. After two of three notes of the piano the door was opened of a sudden to the other world. I sped through heaven and saw God at work. I suffered holy pains. I dropped all my defenses and was afraid of nothing in the world. I accepted all things and to all things I gave up my heart.

The mystic too full of God to speak intelligibly to the world.

Self is the opaque veil that hides the Face of God from us. It can be removed only in spiritual experience, never by mere instruction.

Earth's crammed with heaven, And every common bush afire with God: But only he who sees takes off his shoes.

Consciousness, when it's unburdened by the body, is something that's ecstatic; we use the mind to watch the mind, and that's the meta-nature of our consciousness; we know that we know that we know, and that's such a delicious feeling, but when it's unburdened by biology and entropy, it becomes more than delicious: it becomes magical.

When a wave of love takes over a human being... such an exaltation takes him that he knows he has put his finger on the pulse of the great secret and the great answer.

I had a mystical experience when I was in my late teens, early 20s, and I spent years trying to recapture that.

The robe of flesh wears thin, and with the years God shines through all things.

The word spiritual, not the word religious, is the key.

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth, And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings; ... And, while with silent lifting mind I’ve trod The high untrespassed sanctity of space, Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

In my state of spiritual abstraction, I no longer belong to myself and to my eyesight. I am nothing more than a single narrow gasping lung, floating over the mists and summits.

Look at what trance means. It means to transcend... it means to become transcendental! So if we get a singular transcendental path of light, that could lead to such great dimensions of consciousness, of revelation, of spirituality, of spiritual power.

When a vision begins to form everything changes, including the air around me. I seem no longer to be in the same atmosphere. I feel a peacefulness and a love that are indescribable. I stand alone, and nothing worldly can touch me. I feel that I am looking down from a higher plane and wondering why others cannot see what I am seeing.

Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace, Where never the lark, nor even eagle flew- And, while with silent lifting mind I've trod The high, untrespassed sanctity of space, Put out my hand and touched the face of God.

Every now and then we enter the presence of the numinous and deduce for an instant how we're formed, in what detail the force that infuses every petal might specifically run through us, wishing only to lure us into our full potential.

The mind is the world and the no-mind is freedom from the world. The mind is misery and no-mind is the end of misery and the beginning of ecstasy.

I believe one day the distance between myself and God will / disappear.

I'm actually very spiritual.

God is a synergetic experience. Science can never reveal it, philosophy can never come to it - only a poetic approach, a very passive, very loving approach, can.

If you have really experienced the inner light, sex will disappear. Love will happen to you, but sex will disappear; sexuality will disappear. Love, a very loving personality, will take its place. There will be no desire for sex. If the desire for sex remains, you have not experienced the inner light. Then the inner light is just a projection of the mind.

To see Him and know Him and be in His presence is the soul’s final feast. Beyond this there is no quest. Words fail. We call it pleasure, joy, delight. But these are weak pointers to the unspeakable experience.

If 'ecstasy' meant the sudden intrusion of the sacred into the ordinary, then it had just happened to me.

Faith is like a bright ray of sun light. It enables us to see God in all things as well as all things in God.

At the entrance to the original tower, there is a stone into which Jung carved some words with his own hand: 'Cold or not, God is present.

Oh you, unceasing sun, to me Your particles communicate The luminous essence of God, Are you our God? I do not know. Intoxicated, I say nought, Bewitched by the magic potion. I cannot differentiate Between my drunk and sober state.