Charles Spurgeon Quotes

Purity and simplicity are the two wings with which man soars above the earth and all temporary nature.

To give up the world is to forget the ego, to know it not at all - living in the body, but not of it.

I think I will be able to, in the end, rise above the clouds and climb the stairs to Heaven, and I will look down on my beautiful life.

If you first fortify yourself with the true knowledge of the Universal Self, and then live in the midst of wealth and worldliness, surely they will in no way affect you.

The happiness and peace attained by those satisfied by the nectar of spiritual tranquillity is not attained by greedy persons restlessly moving here and there.

He who climbs above the cares of this world, and turns his face to his God, has found the sunny side of life.

Fasting detaches you from this world. Prayer reattaches you to the next world.

Detachment from things does not mean setting up a contradiction between 'things' and 'God' as if God were another thing and as if creatures were His rivals. We do not detach ourselves from things in order to attach ourselves to God, but rather we become detached from ourselves in order to see and use all things in and for God.

This world is nothing. It is at best only a hideous caricature, a shadow of the Real. We must go to the Real. Renunciation will take us to It. Renunciation is the very basis of our true life; every moment of goodness and real life that we enjoy is when we do not think of ourselves.

In spirituality, when we say growth, we are talking about becoming smaller; not just smaller - non-existent.

This detachment (poverty, chastity, etc.) must not be mere amputation; everything which is shaken off must be simultaneously found again at a higher level.

I try--without success--to stop finding reasons for vanity in anything. When I happen to manage it nonetheless, I feel that I no longer belong to the mortal gang. I am above everything then, above the gods themselves. Perhaps that is what death is: a sensation of great, of extreme superiority.

When an ecstatic is asked the question, What is it that love dares the self to do? she will answer: Love dares the self to leave itself behind, to enter into poverty.

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

First, draw off your hearts, because Jesus Christ, the Head, is risen and ascended upon high, and there sits at the right hand of His Father; and if the Head is in heaven, where should the members be but where the Head is? Shall Christ our Head be in heaven, and shall our hearts, which are His members, lie groveling on the ground and panting after the dust of the earth, making all our inquiry and labor after these? 'If Christ our Head be risen, seek those things that are above, where Christ sits at God's right hand.'

Jnana teaches that the world should be given up, but not on that account to be abandoned. To be in the world but not of it-is the true test of the sannyasin.

When all desires of heart die, mortal man becomes Immortal.

Renunciation is the central sun, round which devotion, knowledge and the rest revolve like planets.

Herein would I live; herein would I die; hereon would I dwell in my thoughts and affections; to the withering and consumption of all the painted beauties of this world, unto the crucifying all things here below, until they become unto me a dead and deformed thing, no way meet for affectionate embraces.

To need nothing is divine, and the less a man needs the nearer does he approach to divinity.

And so, being in Heaven, it was easy for him to lose sight of earth.

The more quickly we loosen our grip on the things of the world the more firmly we can take hold of the things of eternity.

You cease totally and only then you arrive. You enter into the world of God, or godliness, only when you are no more.

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

We choose our next world through what we learn in this one. Learn nothing, and the next world is the same as this one, all the same limitations and lead weights to overcome.