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Spiritual being   /spˈɪrɪtʃəwəl bˈiɪŋ/   Listen
Spiritual being

noun
1.
An incorporeal being believed to have powers to affect the course of human events.  Synonym: supernatural being.






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"Spiritual being" Quotes from Famous Books



... wholly in that exalted state of consciousness which would appear to be more essentially spiritual, than cosmic in the strict sense of the latter word, since cosmic should certainly imply all-inclusiveness, rather than wholly spiritual (spiritual being here used as an extremely high vibration ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad

... the personal bond to the individual for the general bond to the collective holders of the office: and so when the strain became violent it snapped at once. This doubtless natural disposition seems to have been developed, and perhaps permanently fixed, as the law of his intellectual and spiritual being, by the peculiarities of his early religious training. Educated in what is called the "Evangelical" school, early and consciously converted, and deriving his first religious tone, in great measure, from the vehement but misled Calvinism, of which Thomas Scott, ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson

... beliefs of the lower races are in no small measure based on the evidence of visions and dreams, regarded as actual intercourse with spiritual being. From the earliest stages of culture we find religion in close alliance with ecstatic physical conditions. These are brought on by various means of interference with the healthy action of body and mind, and it is scarcely needful to remind the reader that, according to philosophic theories ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen

... the evolution of the spirit, or, in the light of modern knowledge, the growth of the soul as it moves upward. At the outset I must make it plain that I am speaking of evolution since the time when man as a spirit appeared. Given the spiritual being, what are the stages through which he will pass on his way to the goal toward which he ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford

... hypothetical. 'Even supposing that it has come to this,' says he, 'that I had been separated from my body, and that along with the body there had also been "consumed" (as is the meaning of the original word) some portion of my spiritual being, even then, though there were only a thin thread of personality left, enough to call "me" and no more, so to speak, I should cling with that to God, and I know that then I should have enough, for "God is the Rock of my heart, and my ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... is not a material Being, from which Material Beings are created. It is a Spiritual Being—a Being whose Substance is akin to that which we call "Mind," only raised to Infinity and Absolute Perfection and Power. And this is the only way it can "create"—by creating a Thought-Form in Its Mental, or Spiritual Substance. The faintest ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka

... Destiny in any powerful soul has ripened a new truth to this degree,—made it for him an inevitable assumption—then there is in history an end and a beginning. Goethe's homage to Personality, to the full spiritual being of man, is of this degree, and is a soul of eloquence ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various

... all, apparently, is made of baptism save that Mrs. Eddy says our baptism is a purification from all error. In her account of the Last Supper the cup is mostly dwelt upon and that only as showing forth the bitter experience of Jesus. The bread "is the great truth of spiritual being, healing the sick" and the breaking of it the "explaining" it to others. More is made of what is called the last spiritual breakfast with the Disciples by Lake Galilee than of the Last Supper in the upper room. ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins

... spirit, is alluded to, but the idea is as old as Lavaterus at least (p. 52). Kant has a good deal to say, like Scott in his 'Demonology,' on the physics of Hallucination, but it is antiquated matter. He thinks the whole topic of spiritual being only important as bearing on hopes of a future life. As speculation, all is 'in the air,' and as in such matters the learned and unlearned are on a level of ignorance, science will not discuss them. He then repeats the Swedenborg stories, and thinks it would ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang

... spiritual being in the state of suffering can manifest itself in two ways. Either negatively, when the moral man does not receive the law from the physical man, and his state exercises no influence over his manner of feeling; or positively, when the moral ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller

... he was plunged into one of those reveries, or rather absorptions of inward and spiritual being, into which it is said that the consciousness of the Indian dervish can be by prolonged fasting preternaturally resolved. The appetite of all men of powerful muscular development is of a nature far exceeding the properties of any reasonable number of cauliflowers ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... of rhetoric, nor even to hear himself talk; for this he never did. But that great incarnation of spiritual insight and power knew of the great spiritual laws and forces under which we live, and also that supreme fact of the universe, that man is a spiritual being, born to have dominion, and that, by recognizing the true self and by bringing it into complete and perfect harmony with the higher spiritual laws and forces under which he lives, he can touch these laws and forces so that they will respond at every call and ...
— What All The World's A-Seeking • Ralph Waldo Trine

... essentially a spiritual being, and, even in this life, he has many of the spiritual capacities which are to be unfolded in the higher life. Moreover, there are in every refined constitution a great number of delicate sensibilities, which ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, November 1887 - Volume 1, Number 10 • Various

... the meaning of these confidences and listened to them as if there had been no question about her, with emotion, sympathy, and possibly unconscious delight. I saw tears gathering in her eyes, her breast heaved as if her whole spiritual being went out to me with open arms saying: "Come to me; you have suffered enough and deserve some happiness." And I reply with my eyes: "I do not ask, do not remind you of anything; I am ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz

... lawgivers; the reverence for priests and princes interposed between the soul and God: these were principles which Tasso accepted without having properly assimilated and incorporated their substance into his spiritual being. What the poet in him really was, we perceive when he wrote, to use Dante's words, as Love dictates; or as Plato said, when he submitted to the mania of the Muse; or as Horace counseled, when he indulged his genius. It is in the Aminta, in the episodes of the ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds

... Roman Catholicism is totally distinct in its essence from that of Protestantism. The devotion of Protestants is scriptural and reasonable; that of Roman Catholics poetical and affectionate. The Protestant considers God as a spiritual being, and, as such, incomprehensible, the only object of worship, the only fountain of grace and pardon. The Roman Catholic represents the Eternal in material forms, accessible only through the indirect medium of intercession, and addresses him with the familiarity and tenderness peculiar ...
— Roman Catholicism in Spain • Anonymous

... while Christianity neither despises nor affects to desire sorrow, it clearly recognizes its great and beneficial mission. In one word, it shows its disciplinary character, and thus practically interprets the mystery of evil. It regards man as a spiritual being, thrown upon the theatre of this mortal life not merely for enjoyment, but for training,—for the development of spiritual affinities, and the attainment of spiritual ends. It thus reveals a weaning, ...
— The Crown of Thorns - A Token for the Sorrowing • E. H. Chapin

... the physical, mental, and spiritual being is consciously addressed at one and the same time. There is no "piece-work" tolerated. The child is viewed in his threefold relations, as the child of Nature, the child of Man, and the child of God; there is to be no disregarding any one of these ...
— Children's Rights and Others • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin

... and more confirmed, while on the other hand its actual or past results at the lower level of nature have grown and are growing more familiar. We see that Progress is the essential and therefore eternal form of life and spiritual being, which endows it everywhere with worth and substance. With this comes the conviction that the source of all this lies inward, in that inwardness where our true selves lie and springs from the very nature of that. The spirit which is within us is not other than the spirit ...
— Progress and History • Various

... night, and conversed with religious inquirers every day, seeming to himself to become stronger and stronger, because every day more and more excitable and excited. To his hearers, with his flushed sunken cheek and his glittering eye, he looks like some spiritual being just trembling on his flight for upper worlds; but to poor Mrs. X., whose husband he is, things wear a very different aspect. Her woman and mother instincts tell her that he is drawing on his life-capital with both hands, and that the hours of a terrible settlement must come, and the days ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various

... except this sudden terrible demoralization of his physical and spiritual being! While he peered out into the valley, toward the black patch of cedars and pinyons that hid the cabins, moments and moments passed, and in them he was ...
— The Rainbow Trail • Zane Grey

... nations, set up an image or shrine in the temple at Rome and worship according to the privilege granted. They recognized One higher in power than the emperor. The Romans in their practical view of life could not discriminate between spiritual and temporal affairs, and a recognition of a higher spiritual being as giving authority was in their sight the acknowledgment of allegiance to a foreign power. The fact that the Christians met in secret excited the suspicions of many, and it became customary to accuse them on account ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar

... the crowd, convey no moral—nor even mental—infallibility: nay, they have in themselves a peculiar danger, whereas that gift which is common to us all as brethren, the animating spirit of a divine life, in whose soil the spiritual being of all is rooted, cannot make us vain; we cannot pride ourselves on that, for it is common to ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson

... add another word upon this interference, or, rather, entrance of woman into the sphere of politics. As a spiritual being, her duties are like those of man; but, inasmuch as she is different from man, man can not discharge them; and if there be any truth in holding (as our institutions do), that the voice of the whole is ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage

... supposed to be a government for the good of the governed. It is a possession of the governed avowedly for the good of the governors. Aristocracy uses the strong for the service of the weak; slavery uses the weak for the service of the strong. It is no derogation to man as a spiritual being, as Carlyle firmly believed he was, that he should be ruled and guided for his own good like a child—for a child who is always ruled and guided we regard as the very type of spiritual existence. But it is a derogation and an absolute contradiction to that human spirituality in which ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton

... great thought he inherits as his national birthright; free to form and express his opinions on almost every subject, and assured that he will soon acquire the last franchise which men withhold from man,—that of stating the laws of his spiritual being and the beliefs he accepts without hindrance except from clearer views of truth,—he seems to want nothing for a large, wholesome, noble, beneficent life. In fact, the chief danger is that he will ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... aware of his state, the individual may acknowledge his inactivity and make half-formed resolves to be more earnest and diligent, only very soon to relapse into the same former sluggishness. This virus of sloth inoculates the entire spiritual being, poisoning the will and making spiritual activity most disagreeable. Not only does it destroy the will of the soul, but it blindfolds the eyes so that the individual can see no necessity for great fervency in spirit or for diligence ...
— How to Live a Holy Life • C. E. Orr

... God, is a work of years. It is doubtful if there is a phase of man's religious experience for which an interpretation is not here to be found. Notwithstanding this immense sweep of doctrine there are certain vital, fundamental truths on which it all rests:—the Christ-God, Man a spiritual being, the warfare of Regeneration, Marriage, the Sacred Scriptures, the Life of Charity and Faith, the Divine Providence, Death and the Future Life, the Church. We have endeavored to press within the small compass of this book passages which ...
— The Gist of Swedenborg • Emanuel Swedenborg

... many more consumed in adorning and supporting or giving rest to the body; and then if, after summing up those years, we deduct what remains of time at the disposal of the oldest man for the formation of active thought and the improvement of his spiritual being, oh! how brief is the whole period of our mortal life, when longest, though its transactions are to us fraught ...
— Parish Papers • Norman Macleod

... any sanction of the Chinese critics; and moreover there was no Ti () in the sense of imperator then in China. The sovereigns of Kau were Wang or kings. Ku Hsi expands the lines thus:—'Such is the beauty of her robes and appearance, that beholders are struck with awe, as if she were a spiritual being.' Hsue Khien (Yuean dynasty) deals with them thus:—With such splendour of beauty and dress, how is it that she is here? She has come down from heaven I She is a ...
— The Shih King • James Legge

... finite—the universe meaning the totality of individual things in general (without reference to their nature as extended or cogitative); rest and motion, the totality of material being; the absolutely infinite understanding, the totality of spiritual being or the ideas. Individual spirits together constitute, as it were, the infinite intellect; our mind is a part of the divine understanding, yet not in such a sense that the whole consists of the parts, but that the part exists only through the whole. ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg

... come in contact! To one God is, and must be, a person, an individual, who, however spiritual, eternal, omniscient, and omnipresent, is yet as much a person as a man having a will, with purposes, affections, feelings, sentiments, as indeed every spiritual being must have—a being who can be feared, revered, admired, loved. Religion to these men is worship of this person, obedience to his will because it is his, faith in him, love of him. The god of the evolutionists, on the other hand, is, ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various

... brain than impressions on wax could survive the melting of the wax. Surely my memory, my irresistible conviction of personal identity with my past makes it abundantly clear that "I" am a mysterious unchanging spiritual being behind this ...
— The Gospel of the Hereafter • J. Paterson-Smyth

... believes and thinks that he is a mere material being, then he lives the limited life of a material being, and is never able to rise above it. But if, on the contrary, he thinks and believes that he is a spiritual being, then he finds that he possesses all the powers ...
— Within You is the Power • Henry Thomas Hamblin

... were occasionally manifested at such an early period of human history as to be far in advance of any of the few practical applications which have since grown out of them), are evidently essential to the perfect development of man as a spiritual being, but are utterly inconceivable as having been produced through the action of a law which looks only, and can look only, to the immediate material welfare of ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace

... stared at the beautiful speaker, but self-indulgence, the incessant pursuit of worldly and selfish objects for forty years, and the habits of a life into which the thought of God and the dread hereafter never entered, had encased his spiritual being in a sort of brazen armor, through which no ordinary blow of conscience could penetrate. Still he had fearful glimpses of recent events, and his soul, hanging as it was over the abyss of eternity, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various

... whole person in extraordinary disorder, would have caused the ancient heathens to take him for a sibyl full of enthusiasm, and must appear to us rather the consequence of some convulsion than of a conversation with a spiritual being. ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet

... fiery shame seemed to dart through my spiritual being as I heard this, and I made no answer. Some fairy-like little creatures, the children of the Saturnites, as I supposed, here came running towards us and knelt down, reverently clasping their hands ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli

... language. No brain can ideate or form ideas; an idea is an intellectual or mind image, not a brain image; it is an abstract and universal image, and matter cannot represent but what is concrete and individual. Only a simple and spiritual being, the rational soul, can form ideas. Nevertheless our soul, in its present state of substantial union with our body, is extrinsically dependent on the body; to form ideas it needs to have the sensible object presented to it by a phantasm or brain-picture. ...
— Moral Principles and Medical Practice - The Basis of Medical Jurisprudence • Charles Coppens

... into idolatry? Thou art a good man despite—— Despite my delusions, Jesus said, interrupting Paul. So thou'rt afraid the world will fall back into idolatry?—yet Jesus of Nazareth has been proclaimed by thee as the Messiah, a man above mankind. A spiritual being, higher than the angels, therefore, in a way, part and parcel of the Godhead though not yet equal to God. Thinkest, Paul, that those that come after thee will not pick up the Messiah where thou hast left him and carry him still further ...
— The Brook Kerith - A Syrian story • George Moore

... nearly a year in London in apparent idleness, an intensely interested though detached spectator of the city life, but more especially absorbed in his mystical consciousness of its underlying current of spiritual being. After this he crossed to France to learn the language. The Revolution was then (1792) in its early stages, and in his 'Prelude' Wordsworth has left the finest existing statement of the exultant anticipations of a new world of ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher

... this; the longing after righteousness is only one of the manifestations of it; the need itself is that of existence not self-existent for the consciousness of the presence of the causing Self-existent. It is the man's need of God. A moral, that is, a human, a spiritual being, must either be God, or one with God. This truth begins to reveal itself when the man begins to feel that he cannot cast out the thing he hates, cannot be the thing he loves. That he hates thus, that he loves thus, is because God is in him, ...
— Hope of the Gospel • George MacDonald

... Supreme Ruler, and that then he proclaimed the unknown Father, and performed miracles. But at last Christ departed from Jesus, and that then Jesus suffered and rose again, while Christ remained impassible, inasmuch as he was a spiritual being." 'The Writings of Irenaeus, transl. by Rev. Alexander Roberts, D.D., and Rev. W. H. Rambaut, A.B.', Edinburgh, 1868. Vol. I., Book I., Chap ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson

... creation, when we are told that "GOD formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul." {35d} This breath of GOD could be nothing less than the spirit, which came from GOD Himself. It is that higher endowment by which man is a spiritual being, and therefore has an affinity to GOD. It is that which makes him GOD-like, even by nature, at least by his nature as it was before the fall. But even the fall did not utterly dissolve that nature; man still remained a spiritual being, although ...
— The Life of the Waiting Soul - in the Intermediate State • R. E. Sanderson

... between mother and daughter. And when she who was sleeping there, blind, deaf, and senseless, should awake again, up there, with eyes clearer than those of men below, and the ears and senses of a spiritual being to see and hear and judge all she had known and done, all she had felt and made others feel—then, she told herself, her mother might perhaps blame her and punish her more than she had ever done on earth, but she would also clasp her more closely to her heart and ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... when not in touch with him. To be so kept is to have everything in us fully alive to God. Every Christian grace must be in a state of perfect health and vigorous growth. If there be any dwarfed condition of the spiritual being in any part it will be less ...
— The Gospel Day • Charles Ebert Orr

... interests fill his life so that these things do not even occur to him. Give a man a great work to do and you will save him from a thousand temptations to do small and unworthy things. Do not allow the modern conception of religion as gloom and denial to keep you from that which is your right as a spiritual being, the strength, joy and beauty of ...
— Levels of Living - Essays on Everyday Ideals • Henry Frederick Cope

... world; he cannot escape from the duties that he should have fulfilled when he had the means of doing so in the use of this instrument we call the body. If science and religion could clearly teach the awful results that follow suicide, the terrible isolation and deprivation in which the spiritual being who has thrown away his instrument of service finds himself, it would be the one effective cure for a demoralizing tendency. If one has sinned, sometime and somewhere must he meet the consequences. He cannot escape them by escaping from his body, and the sooner he meets them, ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting



Words linked to "Spiritual being" :   deity, divinity, faerie, sprite, lucifer, faery, spirit, eon, angel, aeon, fay, fairy, Old Nick, devil, god, Supreme Being, disembodied spirit, immortal, occult, Prince of Darkness, the Tempter, belief, Satan, trickster, Beelzebub, supernatural



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