Hazrat Inayat Khan Quotes

Every man is half God, half man; he is both spirit and flesh. That is why the mystery of Christ is not simply a mystery for a particular creed: It is universal.

I believe we are all dual beings. Some cultures actually believe we have two souls.

What wonder, then, if human beings in their search for the divine have generally preferred to look within!

As image and apprehension are in organic unity, so, for a Christian, are human body and human soul.

We divide ourselves up into spirit and human, but essentially we are all a part of the same world.

Man is a centaur, a tangle of flesh and mind, divine inspiration and dust.

Philosophers say the Soul is double-faced, her upper face gazes at God all the time and her lower face looks somewhat down, informing the senses; and the upper face, which is the summit of the soul, is in eternity and has nothing to do with time: it knows nothing of time or of body.

If you would behold the spirit of death, open your heart wide unto the body of life. For life and death are one, even as the river and sea are one.

Although I am a pious man, I am not the less a man.

It is dangerous to explain too clearly to man how like he is to the animals without pointing out his greatness. It is also dangerous to make too much of his greatness without his vileness. It is still more dangerous to leave him in ignorance of both, but it is most valuable to represent both to him. Man must not be allowed to believe that he is equal either to animals or to angels, nor to be unaware of either, but he must know both.

Religion--that voice of the deepest human experience.

There is no yawning gulf between man and God. Through his aspiration and meditation, Man can become conscious of his oneness with God.

He who regards all things as one is a companion of Nature.

When we deny the spiritual dimension to our existence, we end up living like animals. And when we deny the physical, sexual dimension to our existence, we end up living like angels. And both ways are destructive, because God made us human.

Now the basest thought possible concerning man is, that he has no spiritual nature; and the foolishest misunderstanding of him possible is, that he has, or should have, no animal nature. For his nature is nobly animal, nobly spiritual,--coherently and irrevocably so; neither part of it may, but at its peril, expel, despise, or defy the other.

We are like droplets of water in an ocean of consciousness; individual to an extent, but those droplets together make up the ocean -- without the droplets there is no ocean. It is the same with this infinite energy mind we call creation/god. We are not part of that infinity -- we are that infinity if we open ourselves up to reconnect with it. Wherever you stand in infinity, you are at the center of infinity. So everything that exists is everything that exists. I am everything that exists; and so are you -- the more you realize that, the more you open up to the full infinity of who you are.

Love is the reflection of God's unity in the world of duality. It constitutes the entire significance of creation.

When you look out of your eyes at nature happening out there...You're looking at you.

The closer a person is to God, the closer he is to people.

Prayers have no boundaries. They can leap miles and continents and be translated instantly into any language.

If within the sophisticated man there is not an unsophisticated one, then he is but one of the devil's angels.

We live in an essential and unresolvable tension between our unity with nature and our dangerous uniqueness. Systems that attempt to place and make sense of us by focusing exclusively either on the uniqueness or the unity are doomed to failure. But we must not stop asking and questing because the answers are complex and ambiguous.

When we break bread and give it to each other, fear vanishes and God becomes very close.

He who never looks up to a living God, to a heavenly presence, loses the power of perceiving that presence, and the universe slowly turns into a dead machine, clashing and grinding on, without purpose or end. If the light within us be darkness, how great is that darkness!

Nothing discernible to the eye of the spirit is more brilliant or obscure than man; nothing is more formidable, complex, mysterious, and infinite. There is a prospect greater than the sea, and it is the sky; there is a prospect greater than the sky, and it is the human soul.