Daniel Bell Quotes

The immediacy of mystic experience simply means that we know God just as we know other objects. God is not a mathematical entity or a system of concepts mutually related to one another and having no reference to experience.

Every day people are straying away from the church and going back to God.

The audience that I try to reach are members of what I call the church alumni association. Now they are people who have not found in institutional religion a God big enough to be God for their world.

We take people to the threshold of religion. Our aim is to induce immediate experience that is beyond the odd, beyond the strange, and beyond the weird. It verges on the wholly other.

In Europe art has to a large degree taken the place of religion. In America it seems rather to be science.

I'm not born again, I'm not Kabbalah, God forbid, but I did have an experience hitting 30 that I needed to lean on something that assured me that everything is going to be okay. I had to regain a lot of my belief in fairy tales, in happy endings.

The hero of the book does long to experience God. But his conception of God is very western.

Let me say that I consider myself a deep believer in the reality of God. I might define God quite differently from the way some people in the Christian faith would do so, but I do not doubt the reality of that experience.

Religion points to that area of human experience where in one way or another man comes upon mystery as a summons to pilgrimage.

The experience of God, or in any case the possibility of experiencing God, is innate.

'Faith and Will' sprang from my personal experience with passing through a dark spiritual time.

Yet higher religion, which is only a search for a larger life, is essentially experience and recognized the necessity of experience as its foundation long before science learnt to do so.

I've never heard God speak out loud to me. That's not an experience I have had.

So often, religion is identified in terms coined by Christianity as sets of belief. But I had the sense that it not only involves practice, but also emotion and levels of our experience that are almost precognitive.

You can educate yourself right out of a relationship with God.

I never intended for the Monster Ball to be a religious experience, it just became one.

The first real unhappiness I remember to have felt was when some one told me, one day, that I did not love God. I insisted, almost tearfully, that I did; but I was told that if I did truly love Him I should always be good. I knew I was not that, and the feeling of sudden orphanage came over me like a bewildering cloud.

I'm not particularly into the formal, political side of faith, although I am spiritual and I do have a faith. But 'Strictly Come Dancing' is my religion.

Those who believe in God because their experience of life and the facts of nature prove his existence must have led sheltered lives and closed their hearts to the voice of their brothers' blood.

No one in human history has given as much thought to the interweaving of altered states of consciousness and religion as I have.

How is it possible that a being with such sensitive jewels as the eyes, such enchanted musical instruments as the ears, and such fabulous arabesque of nerves as the brain can experience itself anything less than a god.

Even when I was saying I was Agnostic and trying to figure out my thoughts, I felt God was allowing me to do that.

When I was a young priest in the 1960s and 1970s, there was much experimentation and confusion in the Church. Teachers and clergy were encouraged to communicate an experience of God's love, but to do it without reference to the Creed, the sacraments, or the tradition.

I was very, very religious. And of course I wrote about it in 'Night.' I questioned God's silence. So I questioned. I don't have an answer for that. Does it mean that I stopped having faith? No. I have faith, but I question it.

Many times I wondered if I were truly carrying out God's plan for my life.