Pilgrimage Quotes

After many paths and many years, perhaps many lifetimes, we become aware of the sacredness of our suffering.

~ Earthschool Harmony

The purpose of a pilgrimage is about setting aside a long period of time in which the only focus is to be the matters of the soul. Many believe a pilgrimage is about going away but it isn’t; it is about coming home. Those who choose to go on pilgrimage have already ventured away from themselves; and now set out in a longing to journey back to who they are. Many a time we believe we must go away from all that is familiar if we are to focus on our inner well-being because we feel it is the only way to escape all that drains and distracts us, allowing us to turn inward and tend to what ails us. Yet we do not need to go to the edges of the earth to learn who we are, only the edges of ourself.

~ L.m. Browning

Mexico, as it was in the 1970s—and isn’t now—was my Paris. With Mexicans, Europeans, and Americans I celebrated life and the journey, which took on qualities of a pilgrimage in which every moment was a movable feast and every place was a shrine. Among the intricately carved ruins in the jungle at Palenque, I partook of the Mayan sacrament, the sacred psilocybin mushroom, and there I learned to see.

~ Mason West

I like the idea that when I die, I will have a long sit-down chat withGod and get answers to all my questions. For example, those apple coresthat I threw out of car windows when I was a child—did any of them becometrees? Few boys or men had ever asked me out. I told myself that itwas because I was almost 6-feet tall. Was that true or was there somethinghumbling I needed to know?

~ Kristine K. Stevens

I don’t know who I am. And I don’t think people ever will know who they are. We have to be humble enough to learn to live with this mysterious question. Who am I? So, I am a mystery to myself. I am someone who is in this pilgrimage from the moment that I was born to the day to come that I’m going to die. And this is something that I can’t avoid, whether I like it or not, or — I’m going to die. So, what I have to do is to honor this pilgrimage through life. And so I am this pilgrim — if I can somehow answer your question — who’s constantly amazed by this journey. Who is learning a new thing every single day. But who’s not accumulating knowledge, because then it becomes a very heavy burden in your back. I am this person who is proud to be a pilgrim, and who’s trying to honor his journey.

~ Hafiz

It was a perfect spring day. The air was sweet and gentle and the sky stretched high, an intense blue. Harold was certain that the last time he had peered through the net drapes of Fossebridge Road (his home), the trees and hedges were dark bones and spindles against the skyline; yet now that he was out, and on his feet, it was as if everywhere he looked, the fields, gardens, trees, and hedgerows and exploded with growth. A canopy of sticky young leaves clung to the branches above him. There were startling yellow clouds of forsythia, trails of purple aubrietia; a young willow shook in a fountain of silver. The first of the potato shoots fingered through the soil, and already tiny buds hung from the gooseberry and currant shrubs like the earrings Maureen used to wear. The abundance of new life was enough to make him giddy.

~ Rachel Joyce

A big wind came up and I hoped a storm would break the heat. But it just blew alot of dust around, and at sunset we had to bar doors and windows against mosquitoes. Itdidn’t do much for our comfort level, but—here’s where the Chemin takes you—we weregrateful. We were grateful because we had (albeit narrowly) escaped heatstroke; becausethe shelter, though unbelievably hot, was clean and quiet; and most of all, because it sleptsix but we had it to ourselves. No people to deal with at the end of your (and their)tether; no sodden bathrooms. No snoring. Pilgrim camaraderie was all very well, butsometimes it was too damn much.

~ Denise Fainberg

I am on pilgrim to self-realisation.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

For pilgrims walking...every footfall is doubled, landing at once on the actual road and also on the path of faith.

~ Robert Macfarlane

All this, I suspect, has been little more than the operation known as the pilgrimage from the cradle to the grave, but I have had a comfortable feeling that, however ordinary my enterprises may have been, they had at any rate the advantage of containing, for me, an element of sustained unfamiliarity. I am one of those persons who begin life by exclaiming they've never seen anything like this before and die in the hope that they may say the same of heaven.

~ Siegfried Sassoon

Queenie Hennessy - I am here to die.Sister Mary Inconnue - Pardon me but you are here to live until you die. There is a significant difference.

~ Rachel Joyce