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You grieve for those for whom you should not grieve. The wise grieve neither for the living nor the dead. Never at any time was I not, nor thou, nor these princes of man, nor shall we ever cease to be. The unreal has no being, the real never ceases to be.
Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought… Men do not sufficiently realize that their future is in their own hands. Theirs is the task of determining first of all whether they want to go on living or not. Theirs is the responsibility, then, for deciding if they want merely to live, or intend to make just the extra effort required for fulfilling, even on this refractory planet, the essential function of the universe, which is a machine for making gods.
When all limitations are transcended, nothing remains but the One Will that is ‘I.’
There are two basic duties for man in this life: one is to serve nature and the other is to find God.
Without humiliation, Love, when it enters the conditioned world, gets caught into the polarity of love and hate and finishes as its own opposite.
Divine Love does not derive its power from separation but from union. It is not fullness but emptiness, not Being but the Void.
The “man of the way” is a familiar concept in all religions. The elect are “called to be saint.” The Buddhist marga, the “path of liberation,” once entered will be followed to the attainment of perfected being. The man of the way in Sufism is the salik or seeker of the truth.
It was the very essence of Gurdjieff’s teaching that the pupil must stand on his own feet and he took every measure, sometimes apparently harsh and brutal, to break down any tendency towards dependence upon himself. He would go to the length of depriving himself of much-needed helpers in his work rather than allow a relationship of dependence, or subordination. At the same time, he took for granted that a teacher is necessary and made it clear why this is so.
No man can work alone until he knows himself, and no one can know himself until he can be separate from his own egoism. The teacher is always needed to apply the knife, to sever the true from the false, but he can never work for his pupil, nor understand for him, nor be for him. We must work, and understand, and be, for ourselves.
Do not despair or cast aside every good hope because your present state is quite unenviable. Rather, turn your thoughts to the blessings already granted you by God and to those reserved by promise for the future.
True prudence is the knowledge of what to do and what not to do. One who possesses it never refrains from virtuous works and is never pierced by the deadly arrow of vice. Thus, he who understands words of prudence knows the difference between what is insidious, structured for deception and what reminds us quietly about the best way to live life.
In the solitary life, what I at hand becomes useless to us and what is wanting cannot be provided, since God the Creator decreed that we should require the help of one another, as it is written in scripture, so that we might associate with one another.
History is the display of the supposed advantages of power and intelligence which some men possess over others, of the struggle for existence hypocritically described by ideologists as the struggle for justice and freedom of the ebb and flow of old and new forms of human righteousness, each vying with the rest in solemnity and triviality… Yet one drop of eternity is of greater weight than a vast ocean of finite things.
The brave man is not he who feels no fear, for that were stupid and irrational, but he whose noble soul subdues its fear and bravely dares the danger nature shrinks from.
A fundamental teaching of Baha’u’llah is the oneness of the world of humanity. Addressing mankind, he says, “Ye are all leaves of one tree and the fruits of one branch.” By this it is meant that the world of humanity is like a tree, the nations or peoples are the different limbs or branches of that tree, and the individual human creatures are as the fruits and blossoms thereof.
The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens.
My first counsel is this: Possess a pure, kindly and radiant heart, that thine may be a sovereignty ancient, imperishable and everlasting.
Only the illimitable permanent is here. A peace stupendous, featureless, still replaces all, what once was I, in it a silent unnamed emptiness content either to fade in the unknowable or thrill with the luminous seas of the Infinite.
In this vision of things the universe will reveal itself in its unity and totality as a manifestation of a single being, nature as its power of manifestation, evolution as its process of gradual manifestation in matter.
Loss is nothing else but change, and change is Nature’s delight.
Men go abroad to wonder at the heights of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses of the rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motions of the stars, and they pass by themselves without wondering.