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If you wish to grow in your spiritual life, you must not allow yourself to be caught up in the workings of the world. You must find time alone, away from the noise and confusion, away from the allure of power and wealth.
Humility is not thinking less of yourself, but thinking of yourself less.
Many people want to serve God, mostly in an advisory capacity.
Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another, “What! You too? I thought I was the only one.”
If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world.
Pain is God’s megaphone to rouse a deaf world.
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.
Perhaps, for many of us, all experience merely defines, so to speak, the shape of that gap where our love of God ought to be. It is not enough. It is something. If we cannot “practice the presence of God,” it is something to practice the absence of God, to become increasingly aware of our unawareness.
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.
But where can man find the truth? If he seeks deep enough in himself he will find it revealed. Each man may know his own heart. He may send a ray of his intelligence into the depths of his soul and search its bottom; he may find it to be as infinitely deep as the sky above his head. He may find corals and pearls, or watch the monsters of the deep. If his thought is steady and unwavering, he may enter the innermost sanctuary of his own temple and see the goddess unveiled. Not everyone can penetrate into such depths, because the thought is easily led astray; but the strong and persistent searcher will penetrate veil after veil, until at the innermost center he discovers the germ of truth, which, awakened to consciousness, will grow into a sun that illuminates the whole of the interior world, wherein everything is contained.
Do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?
I have been driven many times to my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had nowhere else to go. My own wisdom, and that of all about me, seemed insufficient for the day.
Everything has its wonders, even darkness and silence, and I learn, whatever state I may be in, therein to be content.
The best and most beautiful things cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart.
I long to accomplish a great and noble task. But it is my chief duty to accomplish small tasks as if they were great and noble.
There is no king who has not had a slave among his ancestors, and no slave who has not had a king among his.
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.
The Veil
My yearning has loosened
the veil hiding Beauty.
She is now mine — but alas,
My own sight is there blocking the view.
The beat of my own heart sounds in my ear.
The wish to live as others do has long been silenced.
What does their world have to offer?
Nothing but the echo of voices yelling, “more, more.”
Our strength grows out of our weakness. The indignation which arms itself with secret forces does not awaken until we are pricked and stung and sorely assailed. A great man is always willing to be little. Whilst he sits on the cushion of advantages, he goes to sleep. When he is pushed, tormented, defeated, he has a chance to learn something; he has been put on his wits, on his manhood; he has gained facts; learns his ignorance; he is cured of the insanity of conceit; he’s got moderation and real skill. The wise man throws himself on the side of his assailants. It is more his interest than it is theirs to find his weak point.
Though slowly and with pain, the objects of our affections change, as the objects of thought do. There are moments when the affections rule and absorb the man, and make his happiness dependent on a person or persons. But in health, the mind is presently seen again, its overarching vault, bright with galaxies of immutable lights, and the warm loves and fears that swept over us as clouds, must lose their finite character, and blend with God, to attain their own perfection. But we need not fear that we can lose any thing by the progress of the soul. The soul may be trusted to the end. That which is so beautiful and attractive as these relations, must be succeeded and supplanted only by what is more beautiful, and so on forever.
