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How can any external revelation help me unless it is verified by internal experience?
I would study, I would know, I would admire forever. These works of thought have been the entertainments of the human spirit in all ages.
Remain in peace; the fervor of devotion does not depend upon yourself; all that lies in your power is the direction of your will. Give that up to God without reservation. The important question is not how much you enjoy religion, but whether you will whatever God wills. Humbly confess your faults; be detached from the world, and abandoned to God; love him more than yourself, and his glory more than your life; the least you can do is to desire and ask for such a love. God will then love you and put his peace in your heart.
All our progress is an unfolding, like the vegetable bud. You have first an instinct, then an opinion, then a knowledge, as the plant has root, bud, and fruit. Trust the instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.
A free mind has power to achieve all things.
One of the most wonderful things in nature is a glance… it transcends speech… it is the bodily symbol of identity.
Truth is too simple for us… we do not like those who unmask our illusions.
The only good is knowledge, and the only evil is ignorance.
Let other people labor at debates and difficulties and arguments.
You cannot do wrong without suffering wrong.
A stone beneath the surface of the ground is just as heavy as a visible one.
He is free who lives as he wishes to live. He is the man who cannot suffer injury, who cannot be hindered or compelled, whose impulses are not blocked, whose desires attain their purpose, who does not fall into whatever he wishes to avoid… So, no wicked man lives like this, and so he is not free.
Diogenes was free. How so? Not because he was of free parentage, for that was not the case, but because he was himself a free man. He had cast aside every handle by which he might be enslaved… All things sat loosely upon him, all things were attached by slender ties.
The exterior man may be undergoing trials, but the interior man is quite free.
Mortal things are fatal to the flow of God.
The spiritual man stands over all things of earth.
The divine light reaches only the highest love.
May my soul transcend my daily anxiety!
The work of God is the noblest product.
So my outward life is dead. Prayer,
Sorrow, anxiety, do not redeem it.
The highest love alone meets God.
There is a daily suffering and daily suffering,
But only right suffering releases.
There is a place within to suffer rightly
And when found, God enters in soul:
All riches, virtues, and suffering from the loss of them,
All wishes to be unchanged by sin,
Unchangeable, respectable, liked,
Is not suffering. To suffer is not merit.
Suffering is to know God.
Only to know God is suffering.
For if we know God is,
We know within what we are, and only thus.
To know what one is is to suffer, and this is to know God.
To know oneself is to call helplessly on God,
Self-love wanes, God enters.
Self-knowledge is knowledge of God.
If God is not, self-knowledge is not.
Knowledge is to love the unknown.
Without God we cannot no more,
All knowledge passes into Love of God.
Nothing makes a man so like God as suffering.
To suffer is to no one’s fault, not to complain,
To lose oneself in the emotion
Of self-knowing, and know God’s knowledge.
Why does suffering free from lust?
Because lust is self-will, and right suffering
Is another’s will, so infinitely greater
That all self vanishes in freedom.
The first business of the philosopher is to part with self-conceit.
No great thing is created suddenly, any more than a bunch of grapes or a fig. If you tell me that you desire a fig, I answer you that there must be time. Let it first blossom, then bear fruit, then ripen.
I, God, press through your branches into the sap and bear fruit on your boughs.
There is a remedy for every wrong and a satisfaction for every soul.
This energy does not descend into individual life on any other condition than entire possession. It comes to the lowly and simple; it comes to whomever will put off what is foreign and proud; it comes as insight; it comes as serenity and grandeur.
