Kent Nerburn Quotes

The universe extends beyond the mind of man, and is more complex than the small sample one can study. God cannot be reduced to a sample for analysis.

Hidden nature is secret God.

A God that can be understood is no God. Who can explain the Infinite in words?

Love's nationality is separate from all other religions, The lover's religion and nationality is the Beloved (God). The lover's cause is separate from all other causes Love is the astrolabe of God's mysteries.

Mr. Langdon, I did not ask if you believe what man says about God. I asked if you believed in God. There is a difference. Holy scripture is stories...legends and history of man's quest to understand his own need for meaning. I am not asking you to pass judgment on literature. I am asking if you believe in God. When you lie out under the stars, do you sense the divine? Do you feel in your gut that you are staring up at the work of God's hands?

I wouldn't even like to begin to define God - I have absolutely no idea. But what I feel, and what touches me, is a great spiritual power, which I don't even want to name. If I had to, I would say God, because I don't know any other.

The Christian faith is mysterious to the core. It is about things and beings that ultimately can't be put into words. Language fails. And if we do definitively put God into words, we have at that very moment made God something God is not.

I'm not religious, but I am spiritual. I have my own relationship with a being that I consider to be everywhere. All and everything. I don't need a church or a synagogue or a mosque. I don't need to kneel down, I don't need to stand up, I don't need to be hanging from a thread.

Heaven is beyond our imagination . . . . At our most creative moment, at our deepest thought, at our highest level, we still cannot fathom eternity.

The essence of religious feeling does not come under any sort of reasoning or atheism, and has nothing to do with any crimes or misdemeanors. There is something else here, and there will always be something else - something that the atheists will for ever slur over; they will always be talking of something else.

Mystery such as is given of God is beyond the power of human penetration, yet not in opposition to it.

To pray is to take notice of the wonder, to regain a sense of the mystery that animates all beings, the divine margin in all attainments.

If one feels the need of something grand, something infinite, something that makes one feel aware of God, one need not go far to find it. I think that I see something deeper, more infinite, more eternal than the ocean in the expression of the eyes of a little baby when it wakes in the morning and coos or laughs because it sees the sun shining on its cradle.

The person is only a phenomenon, the principle is behind it. Thus from both sides, simultaneously, we find the breaking down of personalities and the approach towards principles, the Personal God approaching the Impersonal, the personal man approaching the Impersonal Man.

In the end, we know God as unknown.

In my prayers, I want to say: Lord, don’t be far from me, and also don’t come too close. Let me contemplate the stars on the texture of your cloth, but don’t unveil your face to me. Allow me to hear the rivers that you send running, but Lord! Lord! Don’t allow me hearing your voice

Man ... has an inborn religious sentiment that whispers of a God to his inmost soul, as a shell taken from the deep yet echoes forever the ocean's roar.

There is no place in the world but contains some trace of God.

Spiritual Intelligence represents our drive for meaning and connection with the infinite.

God is not in heaven - God is in the present moment. If you are also in the present moment you enter the temple.

I think there's a lot that's beautiful about religion and very inspiring, obviously, but I do think that God needs to be rescued from religion actually.

Awe enables us to see in the world intimations of the divine, to sense in small things the beginning of infinite significance, to sense the ultimate in the common and the simple, to feel in the rush of the passing the stillness of the eternal.

If I believe in anything, it is in the dark night of the soul. Awe is my religion, and mystery is its church.