Browse The Living Book

Even if our efforts of attention seem for years to be producing no result, one day a light that is in exact proportion to them will flood the soul. Simone Weil (1909)

If you seek, how is that different from pursuing sound and form? If you don't seek, how are you different from earth, wood, or stone? You must seek without seeking. Wu-Men (1183)

The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair. Walker Percy (1916)

If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. William Blake (1757)

The wall of the Paradise in which Thou, Lord, dwellest, is built of contradictories, nor is there any way to enter but for one who has overcome the highest Spirit of Reason who guards its gate. Nicolas Of Cusa (1401)

I don't want to think a place for you.
Speak to me from everywhere.
Your Gospel can be comprehended
without looking for its source.
Rainer Maria Rilke (1875)

It is only a religious mind, a mind that is enquiring into itself, that is aware of its own movements, its own activity, which is the beginning of self-knowledge -- it is only such a mind that is a revolutionary mind. And a revolutionary mind is a mutating mind is the religious mind. J. Krishnamurti (1895)

Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel. Unfortunately, report cards ordinarily reveal how much a vessel has been filled rather than the extent to which a flame has been kindled. Socrates (469 B.C.E.)

Anyone writing a creative work knows that you open, you yield yourself, and the book talks to you and builds itself. To a certain extent, you become the carrier of something that is given to you from what have been called the Muses--or, in biblical language, "God." This is no fancy, it is a fact. Since the inspiration comes from the unconscious, and since the unconscious minds of the people of any single small society have much in common, what the shaman or seer brings forth is something that is waiting to be brought forth in everyone. So when one hears the seer's story, one responds, "Aha! This is my story. This is something that I had always wanted to say but haven't been able to say." Joseph Campbell (1904)

You are not a prophet, but go humbly on the way of the prophets, and you can arrive where they are. Don't try to steer the boat. Don't open a shop by yourself. Listen. Keep silent. You are not God's mouthpiece. Try to be an ear, and if you do speak, ask for explanations. Jalal Al Din Rumi (1207)

Language does not touch the one who lives in each of us. Jalal Al Din Rumi (1207)

The mirror is thoroughly egoless and mindless. If a flower comes it reflects a flower, if a bird comes it reflects a bird. It shows a beautiful object as beautiful, an ugly object as ugly. Everything is revealed as it is. There is no discriminating mind or self-consciousness on the part of the mirror. If something comes, the mirror reflects; if it disappears the mirror just lets it disappear... no traces of anything are left behind. Such non-attachment, the state of no-mind, or the truly free working of a mirror is compared here to the pure and lucid wisdom of Buddha. Zenkei Shibayma (1894)

A mind that is completely discontented can jump into reality; not a mind that is content, not a mind that is respectable, hedged about by beliefs. J. Krishnamurti (1895)

It is only the silent mind, the mind that is free, that can come upon that which is beyond time. J. Krishnamurti (1895)

To know is to be ignorant; not to know is the beginning of wisdom. J. Krishnamurti (1895)

Christ would never have made the impression He did
on His followers if He had not expressed something that
was alive and active in their unconscious. Christianity
would never have spread through the pagan world with
such astonishing rapidity had its ideas not found an
analogous psychic readiness to receive them. It is this fact
which also makes it possible to say that whoever believes
in Christ is not only contained in Him, but that Christ
then dwells in the believer as the perfect man formed
in the image of God . . .
Carl Jung (1875)

For in our searchings are found all our desires, and we gain victory over our worlds. Upanishads (800 B.C.E.)

All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it--tantalising glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if should really become manifest--if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself--you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say "Here at last is the thing I was made for." We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose all. C. S. Lewis (1898)

As the light increases, we see ourselves to be worse than we thought. We are amazed at our former blindness as we see issuing forth from the depths of our heart a whole swarm of shameful feelings, like filthy reptiles crawling from a hidden cave. We never could have believed that we had harbored such things, and we stand aghast as we watch them gradually appear. But while our faults diminish, the light by which we see them waxes brighter, and we are filled with horror. Bear in mind, for your comfort, that we only perceive our malady when the cure begins. Francois Fenelon (1651)

I have held many things in my hands, and I have lost them all;
But whatever I have placed in God's hands, that I still possess.
Martin Luther (1483)

I laugh when I hear that the fish in the water are thirsty. You don't grasp the fact that what is most alive of all is inside your own house; and so you walk from one holy city to the next with a confused look! Kabir (1398)

Each one is bound to his own ideal; he whose ideal is immortal must become immortal himself to attain it. Franz Harman (1838)

Confucius said, "In the archer there is a resemblance to the mature person. When he misses the bull's-eye, he turns and seeks the reason for his failure in himself. Confucius (551 B.C.E.)

I see, hear and know simultaneously and learn what I know as if in a moment. But what I do not see I do not know for I am not learned. St. Hilegard Of Bingen (1098)

Time and space are but physiological colors which the eye makes, but the soul is light; where it is, is day; where it was, is night. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803)