Brennan Manning Quotes

Spiritual growth-looking inward-is replacing the pursuit of external power-reaching outward to manipulate and control-as the cure for the insecurity at the core of human experience.

This is something basic to be understood - the ego must come to a peak, it must be strong, it must have attained an integrity - only then can you dissolve it. A weak ego cannot be dissolved. And this becomes a problem.

Aging is a staircase - the upward ascension of the human spirit, bringing us into wisdom, wholeness and authenticity. As you may know, the entire world operates on a universal law: entropy, the second law of thermodynamics. Entropy means that everything in the world, everything, is in a state of decline and decay, the arch. There's only one exception to this universal law, and that is the human spirit, which can continue to evolve upwards.

Within the spiritual journey you understand that suffering becomes something that has been given to you to show you where your mind is still stuck. It’s a vehicle to help you go to work. That’s why it’s called grace.

Inside each one of us is a beautiful flower garden. This is the garden of the soul. With each lesson we learn, the garden grows. As we learn together, our individual gardens form a tranquil paradise.

I am convinced that most people do not grow up ... our real selves, the children inside, are still innocent and shy as magnolias.

Caring for your inner child has a powerful and surprisingly quick result: Do it and the child heals.

The sacred duty of being an individual is to gradually learn how to live so as to awaken the eternal within you.

We are on a very rich emotional and physical journey on this planet.

I got a few marriage proposals in my 20s. I just wasn't ready. I just knew if I committed, I would've wound up doing something wrong, messing it up. I still felt like I had some living to do.

Each one of us has our own evolution of life, and each one of us goes through different tests which are unique and challenging. But certain things are common. And we do learn things from each other's experience. On a spiritual journey, we all have the same destination.

Something most people don't know about me is that I never grew up.

Man learns through experience, and the spiritual path is full of different kinds of experiences. He will encounter many difficulties and obstacles, and they are the very experiences he needs to encourage and complete the cleansing process.

I'm on a missionary journey to become the best version of myself.

In my new book, 'Birth,' my goal is to share the path I have traveled in the spiritual sphere and in the business and philanthropic sphere in order to reveal the essential connection between the two.

There has already been the karmic work: that what life has transformed in me, this initiation brought on, of necessity, by trials.

Sometimes I attract roles that are necessary either for personal growth or enlightenment.

Psychotherapy is what God has been secretly doing for centuries by other names; that is, he searches through our personal history and heals what needs to be healed - the wounds of childhood or our own self-inflicted wounds.

Lent is a time to renew wherever we are in that process that I call the divine therapy. It's a time to look what our instinctual needs are, look at what the dynamics of our unconscious are.

Eventually, I joined a church. I didn't go there to find a boyfriend; I truly wasn't looking for anyone other than the person I wanted to be.

Sobriety has opened my mind and unlocked parts of me that I didn't even realize existed.

There isn't anything except your own life that can be used as ground for your spiritual practice. Spiritual practice is your life, twenty-four hours a day.

It all begins with forgiveness, because to heal the world, we first have to heal ourselves. And to heal the kids, we first have to heal the child within, each and every one of us.

It was the first rent in the holy image of my father, it was the first fissure in the columns that had upheld my childhood, which every individual must destroy before he can become himself.