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Explore all of the quotations in our Living Book…
Circumstance is a severe task master to the weak, an obedient servant to the strong.
What we do during our working hours determines what we have. What we do in our leisure hours determines what we are.
The only sure way to drop a problem is to never pick it up in the first place.
The beauty of the world is Christ’s tender smile for us, coming through matter.
Let him lovingly cast all his thoughts and cares, and his sins, too, as it were, on that unknown Will. Beyond this unknown will of God, he must desire and purpose nothing; neither way, nor rest, nor work, neither this nor that, nor wholly subject and offer himself up to this unknown will.
It is in your power, whenever you choose, to retire into yourself. Nowhere can you retire with more quietness or more freedom than within your own spirit… Constantly give yourself to this retreat and renew yourself. Let your principles be brief and fundamental, and when you have returned to them, that will be enough to purify the spirit completely, and to send you back from all discontent.
Silence is a source of Great Strength.
Where God is, all agree.
Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road. Healthy, free, the world before me… leading wherever I choose.
A man must relate himself to new forces, coming from that which he has not realized, through seeing things differently, through touching ideas that have transforming power and that can only be proved by his own experience of them and never evidentially by an appeal to the outer world of the sense.
Argument may be overcome by stronger argument, and force by greater force, but truth and force have no relation — nothing in common by which the one can act upon the other. They dwell apart, and will continue to do so.
Learning is but an adjunct to ourself,
And where we are our learning likewise is.
I am very little inclined on any occasion to say anything unless I hope to produce some good by it.
One believes what one wishes to believe.
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.
The almighty Allah judges you neither by your countenance nor your wealth, but by the purity of your hearts and your deeds.
There is apart from mere intellect, in the make-up of every superior human identity, a wondrous something that realizes without argument, frequently without what is called education (though I think it the goal and apex of all education deserving the name), an intuition of the absolute balance, in time and space, of the whole of this multifariousness, this revel of fools, and incredible make-believe and general unsettledness, we call the world.
A soul-sight of that divine clue and unseen thread which holds the whole congeries of things, all history and time, and all events, however trivial, however momentous, like a leashed dog in the hand of the hunter. Of such soul-sight and root-centre for the mind mere optimism explains only the surface.
A kind of waking trance I have frequently had, quite up from boyhood, when I have been all alone. This has generally come upon me through repeating my own name two or three times to myself, silently, till all at once, as it were, out of the intensity of the consciousness of individuality, the individuality itself seemed to fade away into boundless being, and this not a confused state, but the clearest of the clearest, the surest of the surest, utterly beyond words, where death was almost a laughable impossibility, the loss of personality (if so it were) seeming no extinction but the only true life… I am ashamed of my feeble description. Have I not said that the state is beyond words?
Freedom is a new religion.
Whether we are in a pleasant or a painful state depends, finally, upon the kind of matter that pervades and engrosses our consciousness.
