Brennan Manning Quotes

For human beings, the most daunting challenge is to become fully human. For to become fully human is to become fully divine.

Every good man progressively becomes God. To become God, to be man, and to educate oneself, are expressions that are synonymous.

Being enlightened is just being aware. It's just being aware of something that you weren't aware before.

When all life is seen as divine, everyone grows wings.

Learn to recognize the false dawn from the true; distinguish the color of the wine from the color of the cup. Then it may be that patience and time may produce, out of the spectrum-viewing sight, true vision, and you will behold colors other than these mortal hues, you will see pearls instead of stones. Pearls, did I say? Nay more, you will become a sea, you will become a sun traveling the sky.

By constantly keep one's attention on the Source, the ego is dissolved in that Source like a salt-doll in the sea.

Sannyas is only a declaration. The work is meditation. In one single word, my religion is complete, and that is meditation.

Spiritual practices help us move from identifying with the ego to identifying with the soul. Old age does that for you too. It spiritualizes people naturally.

I called the world of phenomena an illusion, I called my eyes and my tongue an accident, valueless phenomena. No, that is all over; I have awakened, I have really awakened and I have just been born today.

Enlightenment is not a complete remedy.

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.

Enlightenment is always through surrender, but surrender is achieved through intelligence. Only idiots cannot surrender. To surrender you need great intelligence. To see the point of surrender is the climax of insight; to see the point that you are not separate from existence is the highest that intelligence can give to you.

There are times, you know, it's said in the Spiritual Tradition, just a glimpse at an enlightened personage can convey immense information at the sub-conscious level that sprouts later, that we don't even know.

India saw from the beginning, and, even in her ages of reason and her age of increasing ignorance, she never lost hold of the insight, that life cannot be rightly seen in the sole light, cannot be perfectly lived in the sole power of its externalities.

An important consequence of freeing oneself from the fear of death is a radical opening to spirituality of a universal and non-denominational type.

The way you become divine is to become wholly human.

Do not think you will necessarily be aware of your own enlightenment.

Listen to the inner light; it will guide you. Listen to inner peace; it will feed you. Listen to inner love; it will transform you, it will divinise you, it will immortalise you.

The words that enlighten the soul are more precious than jewels.

We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.

Changing is not just changing the things outside of us. First of all we need the right view that transcends all notions including of being and non-being, creator and creature, mind and spirit. That kind of insight is crucial for transformation and healing.

Religion is a search for transcendence. But transcendence isn't necessarily sited in an external god, which can be a very unspiritual, unreligious concept.

Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.

Pain and foolishness lead to great bliss and complete knowledge, for Eternal Wisdom created nothing under the sun in vain.