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Explore all of the quotations in our Living Book…
Your real influence is measured by your treatment of yourself.
All things in the world are two. In our minds we are two, good and evil. With our eyes we see two things, things that are fair and things that are ugly. We have the right hand that strikes and makes for evil, and we have the left hand full of kindness, near the heart. One foot may lead us to an evil way, the other foot may lead us to a good. So are all things two, all two.
We can only give what we have.
Practice right view, right aim, right speech, right action, right living, right effort, right mindfulness, right meditation.
Each man reaps on his own farm.
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.
We lop away that bearing boughs may live.
If you are content with the old world, try to preserve it; it is sick… But if you can no longer live in the eternal conflict between your convictions and life, thinking one way and acting another, take it upon yourselves to leave the shelter of the pale and ruinous arches.
Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good.
If you wish to maintain a will conformable to nature, you have every security, every facility, you have no troubles. If you wish to maintain what is in your own power and is naturally free, and if you are content with these, what else do you care for? For who is the master of such things? Who can take them away? If you choose to be modest and faithful, who shall not allow you to be so?
He who does not understand how the soul contains the Beautiful within itself, seeks to realize beauty without, by laborious production.
The man of inner life is easily aware of himself, since he is never totally absorbed in outward affairs. Therefore, his exterior occupations and necessary activities do not distract him, and he adjusts himself to things as they come. The man whose inner life is well-ordered, is not bothered by strange and troublesome ways of others. A man is blocked and distracted by such things only as he permits himself to be.
I go before thee to make the crooked places straight.
That life is better life, past fearing death,
Than that which lives to fear.
Who keeps one thing in view makes all things serve.
How shalt thou hope for mercy, rendering none?
Where one man shapes his life by precept and example, there are a thousand who have it shaped for them by impulse and by circumstances.
Peter of Damascus assures us that “nothing is better than to realize one’s weakness and ignorance, and nothing is worse than not to be aware of them.”
The question at stake is no common one. It is, “Are we in our right sense or are we not?”
If you want to awaken all of humanity, then awaken all of yourself. If you want to eliminate the suffering in the world, then eliminate all that is dark and negative in yourself. Truly, the greatest gift you have to give is that of your own self-transformation.
