Famous and inspirational quotes on spiritual perfection

“Be helpless and dumbfounded,

unable to say yes or no.

Then a stretcher will come

from grace to gather us up.”

Rumi

"With the keenness that wonder brings on, she noticed a vein in her own hand that she had not noticed for years, and she saw that her fingers were thin and short; and she saw a skirt covering her knees. And beneath everything she saw, she felt something: her own attention."

Clarice Lispector (Apple, p86)

“We say our practice should be without gaining ideas, without expectations, even of enlightenment.”

Shunryu Suzuki (p41)

“I am is a vain thought; I am not is a vain thought; I shall be is a vain thought. Vain thoughts are a sickness, an ulcer, a thorn. But after overcoming all vain thoughts one is called a silent thinker. And the thinker, the silent One, does no more arise, no more pass away, no more tremble, no more desire. That unshakeable deliverance of the heart: that, verily, is the object of the Holy Life, that is the essence, that is the goal.” Shakyamuni Buddha (quoted in A Buddhist Bible by Dwight Goddard. p 59. Beacon Press, USA, 1994)

“Everything changes, everything passes away,

Things appearing, things disappearing.

But when all is over- everything having appeared and disappeared,

Being and extinction both transcended-

Still the basic emptiness and silence abides,

And that is blissful Peace.”

Dwight Goddard, A Buddhist Bible p84

"Both God and the [initiate] know themselves to be the immovable centre of the movable, the eternal witness of the transient."

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj (p104,137) (I AM THAT, p87)

"The still point of the turning world"

T.S. Eliot 

“…penetrated by the Buddha light… those meditating in locked lotus buds abandon the notion of anything to be saved, anything to be held to, anything to be done, and their lotus stems, released from the octopus tentacles of their selves-of-sleep, lift flowers to the sun, with themselves sitting as Buddhas on the corollas, rapt in selfless realisation of the Self that is no self, and the Void that is no void.”

Joseph Campbell (summarizing the Amitayur Dhyana Sutra in The Mythic Image, p228)

“We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within us is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty; to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal ONE. And this deep power in which we exist and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing, and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (The Over-Soul)

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These fragments and quotes are taken from the unpublished writings of Jack Haas, selected from the notebooks 1990-2005.