Our sensual desires promise us a promenade, but deliver us only a dragon

“Our sensual desires promise us a promenade, but deliver us only a dragonnade. A sprightly step in the forenoon turns into a draggled tail in the afternoon. All-nighters of roister-doistery lead only to mornings of huggermuggery; that is to say, of sickness and sadness. Need I speak of it? Every carnal joy begins with a caress, but in the end curls up into a ball and dies. I ask the question again. What can you see outside the monastery walls that you can’t see inside? Behold heaven and earth and all the elements; from these all things are made.” Thomas a Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, Book One, Chapter 20, in Spiritual Classics, ed. Foster, page 151

Spirituality is an explosive state of creation

"The religious mind does not function from a center of authority, whether it is accumulated knowledge as tradition, or it is experience which is really the continuation of tradition, the continuation of conditioning. The religious spirit does not think in terms of time, the immediate results, the immediate reformation within the pattern of society. We said the religious mind is not a ritualistic mind; it does not belong to any church, to any group, to any pattern of thinking. The religious mind is the mind that has entered into the unknown, and you cannot come to the unknown except by jumping; you cannot carefully calculate and enter the unknown. The religious mind is the real revolutionary mind, and the revolutionary mind is not a reaction to what has been. The religious mind is really explosive, creative, not in the accepted sense of the word creative, as in a poem, decoration, or building, as in architecture, music, poetry, and all the rest of it, it is in a state of creation." The Book of Life

Spirituality is the transcendent in our own existence

“Nothing exists for its own sake, nothing is valid by its own right. What seems to be a purpose is but a station on the road. All is set in the dimension of the holy. All is endowed with bearing on God…This is what we mean by the term ‘spiritual’: It is the reference to the transcendent in our own existence, the direction of the Here toward the Beyond…It is impossible to grasp spirit in itself. Spirit is a direction, the turning of all beings to God: theotropism. It is always more than – and superior to – what we are and know.” Abraham Heschel, God in Search of Man, 415-416

Bring spirituality into your practical life

“Half an hour after they have insulted God by praying to Him in this deadest of all dead languages, not understanded of the people, they leave the church, themselves pacified in their perennial determination to put no check on their natural covetousness; to act on their own opinions, be they right or wrong; to do whatever they can make money by, be it just or unjust; and to thrust themselves, with the utmost of their soul and strength, to the highest, by them attainable, pinnacle of the most bedrummed and betrumpeted booth in the Fair of the World.”

John Ruskin, Fors Clavigera

Much on earth is concealed from us

“Much on earth is concealed from us, but in place of it we have been granted a secret, mysterious sense of our living bond with the other world, with the higher heavenly world, and the roots of our thoughts and feelings are not here but in other worlds. That is why philosophers say it is impossible on earth to conceive the essence of things. God took seeds from other worlds and sowed them on this earth, and raised up his garden; and everything that could sprout sprouted, but it lives and grows only through its sense of being in touch with other mysterious worlds; if this sense is weakened or destroyed in you, that which has grown up in you dies. Then you become indifferent to life, and even come to hate it. So I think.” Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, 320

Spirituality is the active soul

Spirit is that which is self-evident
“The physicians say, they are not materialists; but they are: – Spirit is matter reduced to an extreme thinness: O so thin! – But the definition of spiritual should be, that which is its own evidence. What notions do they attach to love! what to religion! One would not willingly pronounce these words in their hearing, and give them the occasion to profane them.” Ralph Waldo Emerson, Experience, 250

Spirituality is the active soul!
'Transcendentalism teaches that the religious spirit is a necessary aspect of human nature – or of the human condition – and that the religious spirit does not reside in external forms, words, ceremonies, or institutions. In Emerson's words, "The one thing of value in the universe is the active soul." Robert Richardson, Emerson: The Mind on Fire

The fulfillment of existence…is the place on which one stands.

“There is something that can only be found in one place. It is a great treasure, which may be called the fulfillment of existence. The place where this treasure can be found is the place on which one stands…The environment which I feel to be the natural one, the situation which has been assigned to me as my fate, the things that happen to me day after day, the things that claim me day after day – these contain my essential task and such fulfillment of existence as is open to me.” 37
“God’s grace consists precisely in this, that he wants to let himself be won by man, that he places himself, so to speak, into man’s hands. God wants to come to his world, but he wants to come to it through man. This is the mystery of our existence, the superhuman chance of mankind.” 40

Religion should take account, first, of the needs of human beings

“Men can agree and live together in peace, without coercion, without enforced rules of irrational tradition, and with their common hopes as guide.” Manas

Religious inspiration “would recognize as ‘spiritual’ only those free human expressions which are entirely unconnected with any motive but the highest of which man is capable, and it would preserve and promulgate this idea of religion as sacred above all."