Shirley MacLaine Quotes

Animals are just pure, uncomplicated entities of creation from God. They live like the Maasai do in Kenya-for each day is forever to them and the "Now" is what they live in. You can get aggravated with your pets and yell at them, but in a matter of minutes they are licking your hand again in love.

We need another and a wiser and a perhaps more mystical concept of animals.

I call animals "guardians of Being," especially animals that live with humans. Because, for many humans, it's through their contact with animals they get in touch with that level of being.

I do believe in an afterlife. I try to be at one with people and try to love life as much as I can.

I think I have some very meaningful relationships with people; we all do. At the same time, I recognize that everyone is following their own heart; there's been people who have left my life, and I don't have a problem with that. This is a transitory world; we're all spirits just looking for love and finding it and holding on.

Meditation is to dive all the way within, beyond thought, to the source of thought and pure consciousness. It enlarges the container, every time you transcend. When you come out, you come out refreshed, filled with energy and enthusiasm for life.

Reconnecting to the animal means getting to a more sensitive, more artful and more humorous place in the psyche.

If prayer stands as the place where God and human beings meet, then I must learn about prayer.

They are all beasts of burden in a sense, ' Thoreau once remarked of animals, 'made to carry some portion of our thoughts.' Animals are the old language of the imagination; one of the ten thousand tragedies of their disappearance would be a silencing of this speech.

Each stone, each bend cries welcome to him. He identifies with the mountains and the streams, he sees something of his own soul in the plants and the animals and the birds of the field.

My new work deals with emptying my body: 'Boat emptying, stream entering.' This means that you have to empty the body/boat to the point where you can really be connected with the fields of energy around you. I think that men and women in our Western culture are completely disconnected from that energy, and in my new work I want to make this connection possible.

All spiritual interests are supported by animal life.

My story is important not because it is mine, God knows, but because if I tell it anything like right, the chances are you will recognize that in many ways it is also yours… it is precisely through these stories in all their particularity, as I have long believed and often said, that God makes himself known to each of us more powerfully and personally. If this is true, it means that to lose track of our stories is to be profoundly impoverished not only humanly but also spiritually.

Animals never worry about Heaven or Hell. Neither do I. Maybe that's why we get along.

Shortage of time is not your problem. Shortage of money is not your problem. Shortage of Connection to the Energy that creates worlds is at the heart of all sensations of shortage that you are experiencing.

Relationships are the Holy Spirit's laboratories in which He brings together people who have the maximal opportunity for mutual growth.

The human soul doesn't want to be fixed, it simply wants to be seen and heard. The soul is like a wild animal - tough, resilient and shy. When we go crashing through the woods shouting for it to come out so we can help it, the soul will stay in hiding. But if we are willing to sit quietly and wait for a while, the soul may show itself.

Animals teach us about the animals in ourselves. We need their spirits.

The animal has secrets which, unlike the secrets of caves, mountains, seas are specifically addressed to man.

The animals are at a level prior to thinking. They haven't lost themselves in thought. We rise above thinking and then we meet them again, where we're both in no-thought. There's a deep connection.

Religion operates not only on the vertical plane but also on the horizontal. It seeks not only to integrate men with God but to integrate men with men and each man with himself.

I am a deeply religious person, but I belong to no denomination. I follow the spirit of God's law, not the letter of the law. One can become so attached to the outward symbols and structure of religion that one forgets its original intent - to bring one closer to God. We can only gain access to the Kingdom of God by realizing it dwells within us as well as in all humanity. Know that we are all cells in the ocean of infinity, each contributing to the others' welfare.

We should understand well that all things are the work of the Great Spirit. We should know the Great Spirit is within all things: the trees, the grasses, the rivers, the mountains, and the four-legged and winged peoples; and even more important, we should understand that the Great Spirit is also above all these things and peoples. When we do understand all this deeply in our hearts, then we will fear, and love, and know the Great Spirit, and then we will be and act and live as the Spirit intends.

If you come to Plum Village in the summertime, you see many lotus flowers. Without the mud the lotus flowers cannot grow. You cannot separate lotus flowers from the mud. It is the same with understanding and love. These are two kinds of flowers that grow on the ground of suffering

Spiritual partnership is the partnership between equals for the purpose of spiritual growth.