Sacred Texts Quotes

• Stay with friends who support you in these. Talk with them about sacred texts, and how you are doing, and how they are doing, and keep your practices together.

  Rumi

  Friendship, Practice, Support You

  Rumi (2015). “Selected Poems”, p.106, Penguin UK

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• Much though he recites the sacred texts, but acts not accordingly, that heedless man is like a cowherd who only counts the cows of others - he does not partake of the blessings of the holy life.

  Gautama Buddha

  Buddhist, Blessing, Men

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• Humans impart meaning and purpose to almost all aspects of life. This sense of meaning and purpose gives us a road map for how to live a good life. This guidance emerges spontaneously from the interactions of human beings living in societies and thinking together about how best to get along. It doesn't require a god or sacred text.

  Greg Graffin

  Good Life, Thinking, Giving

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• Pascal in his bitter rendition of the practices of the Jesuit intellectuals he despised, including their demonstration of "the utility of interpretation," a device of manufacturing consent based on reinterpretation of sacred texts to serve wealth, power, and privilege.

  Noam Chomsky

  Practice, Sacred, Privilege

  Source: www.publicanthropology.org

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• What the Bible says is what God has disclosed and we want to approach this sacred text with cognitive reverence.

  D. A. Carson

  Want, Sacred, Reverence

  Source: www.booksataglance.com

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• When the devil makes his offer (always open incidentally) of the kingdoms of the earth, it is the bordellos which glow so alluringly to most of us, not the banks and the counting-houses and the snow-swept corridors of power . . . Sex is the mysticism of a materialistic society - in the beginning was the Flesh, and the Flesh became Word; with its own mysteries - this is my birth pill; swallow it in remembrance of me! - and its own sacred texts and scriptures - the erotica which fall like black atomic rain on the just and unjust alike, drenching us, stupefying us. To be carnally minded is life!

  Malcolm Muggeridge

  Sex, Fall, Rain

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• Sacred texts always offend reason.

  Mason Cooley

  Sacred, Reason

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• Some people, who are deeply involved in an organized, traditional religion, find it very difficult to accept that their way isn't the only way. And that their sacred text isn't the only text and it must be taken literally.

  Elizabeth Lesser

  Taken, People, Sacred

  Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

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• In 1879 the Bengali scholar S.M. Tagore compiled a more extensive list of ruby colors from the Purana sacred texts: ‘like the China rose, like blood, like the seeds of the pomegranate, like red lead, like the red lotus, like saffron, like the resin of certain trees, like the eyes of the Greek partridge or the Indian crane…and like the interior of the half-blown water lily.’ With so many gorgeous descriptive possibilities it is curious that in English the two ancient names for rubies have come to sound incredibly ugly.

  Victoria Finlay

  Eye, Blood, Color

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• Women were forbidden to study the most ancient sacred text, the Veda.

  Wendy Doniger

  Vedas, Sacred, Study

  Wendy Doniger (2010). “The Hindus: An Alternative History”, p.36, Oxford University Press, USA

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• No calamity happens to those who eagerly follow auspicious customs and the rule of good conduct, to those who are always careful of purity, and to those who mutter ,sacred texts and offer burnt oblations.

  Guru Nanak

  Sacred, Purity, Calamity

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• When I grew up in the early '90s, the new World Wide Web felt like a gimmick, and I had no idea of the changes in store. In the summers, I'd backpack through Europe, follow the Grateful Dead. I had a car and a tent and traveled around the Great Lakes and out West. Jack Kerouac was my guiding light, his 'On the Road' a sacred text.

  Tony D'Souza

  Summer, Grateful, Europe

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• It took me whole decades to appreciate the depth and true value of yoga. Sacred texts supported my discoveries, but it was not they that signposted the way. What I learned through yoga, I found out through yoga.

  B.K.S. Iyengar

  Yoga, Discovery, Appreciate

  B.K.S. Iyengar, John J. Evans, Douglas Abrams (2006). “Light on Life: The Yoga Journey to Wholeness, Inner Peace, and Ultimate Freedom”, p.10, Rodale

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• Those who would assail the Book of Mormon should bear in mind that its veracity is no more dubious than the veracity of the Bible, say, or the Qur'an, or the sacred texts of most other religions. The latter texts simply enjoy the considerable advantage of having made their public debut in the shadowy recesses of the ancient past, and are thus much harder to refute.

  Jon Krakauer

  Book, Past, Mind

  Jon Krakauer (2013). “Under The Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith”, p.79, Pan Macmillan

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• The president is the high priest of what sociologist Robert Bellah calls the 'American civil religion.' The president must invoke the name of God (though not Jesus), glorify America's heroes and history,quote its sacred texts (the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution), and perform the transubstantiation of pluribus unum.

  Jonathan Haidt

  Jesus, Hero, Names

  Jonathan Haidt (2012). “The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion”, p.179, Penguin UK

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• We like to put sacred texts in flowing waters, so I rolled it up, tied it to a piece of wood, placed a dandelion on top, and floated it in the stream which flows into the Swat River. Surely God would find it there.

  Malala Yousafzai

  Rivers, Water, Pieces

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• The underlying struggle - between worlds of plenty and worlds of want; between the modern and the ancient; between those who embrace our teeming, colliding, irksome diversity, while still insisting on a set of values that binds us together, and those who would seek, under whatever flag or slogan or sacred text, a certainty and simplification that justifies cruelty toward those not like us.

  Barack Obama

  Struggle, Diversity, Together

  Barack Obama (2007). “Dreams From My Father”, p.10, Canongate Books

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• There's a lovely Hasidic story of a rabbi who always told his people that if they studied the Torah, it would put Scripture on their hearts. One of them asked, "Why on our hearts, and not in them?" The rabbi answered, "Only God can put Scripture inside. But reading sacred text can put it on your heart, and then when your hearts break, the holy words will fall inside.

  Anne Lamott

  Fall, Reading, Heart

  Anne Lamott (2006). “Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith”, p.73, Penguin

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• There's no way you can misunderstand the teachings of the Qur'an, there's no way you can misunderstand the teachings of the Bible, there's no way you can misunderstand the teachings of the Bhaghavad Gita, or of the Book of Mormon, or of the other sacred texts of many of those religions.

  Neale Donald Walsch

  Book, Teaching, Gita

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• The 21st century - and the atheists - needs the presence of religion, just as religion must deal with the real challenges and the thinkers of the day in order to sharpen the conscience and the intelligence of those who study the timeless sacred texts in a spirit of responding to the questions of their time.

  Tariq Ramadan

  Atheist, Real, Order

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