Spiritual Illness Quotes

Religion is a species of mental disease.

Religion is capable of driving people to such dangerous folly that faith seems to me to qualify as a kind of mental illness.

To believe you're being psychically attacked gives you an understanding of your illness that no Western doctor can provide; this can be reassuring when you've exhausted the Western doctor tool kit, and the doctors are sending you to acupuncturists for pain relief.

Indifference is the sign of sickness, a sickness of the soul more contagious than any other.

Everyone had some defect, or body or of mind: he thought of all the people he had known (the whole world was like a sick house and there was no rhyme or reason in it), he saw a long procession, deformed in body, warped in mind, some with illness of the flesh, weak hearts or weak lungs, and some with illness of the spirit, languor of will, or craving for liquor. At that moment he felt a holy compassion for them all. …The words of the dying God crossed his memory: Forgive them, for they know not what they do.

We have to be very conscious of the fact that beneath every illness is a prohibition. A prohibition that comes from a superstition.

The soul is subject to health and disease, just as is the body. The health and disease of both . . . undoubtedly depend upon beliefs and customs, which are peculiar to mankind.

Sin is a spiritual illness; thus sinners are in need of salvation.

Sin is disease, deformity, and weakness.

My soul is sick with every day's report of wrong and outrage with which earth is filled.

The disease of an evil conscience is beyond the practice of all the physicians of all the countries in the would.

Soul loss is regarded as the most serious diagnosis and the single greatest cause of premature death or serious illness by the traditionals, and it's not even mentioned in our Western medical textbooks.

They that are intoxicated by self-conceit have interposed themselves between it and the Divine and infallible Physician. Witness how they have entangled all men, themselves included, in the mesh of their devices. They can neither discover the cause of the disease, nor have they any knowledge of the remedy.

Those who have the disease called Jesus will never be cured.

Warned by such evidences of their spiritual illness, believers profit by their humiliations. Robbed of their foolish confidence in the flesh, they take refuge in the grace of God. And when they have done so, they experience the nearness of the divine protection which is to them a strong fortress (Ps 30:6-7).

In medieval times, if someone displayed the symptoms we now identify as boredom, that person was thought to be committing something called acedia, a 'dangerous form of spiritual alienation' -- a devaluing of the world and its creator.