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Explore all of the quotations in our Living Book…
What is rational is real, and what is real is rational.
Being overly concerned with your faults is worse for your spiritual condition than the fault itself.
Our moods do not believe in each other.
Individual character is in the right that is in strict consistence with itself. Self-contradiction is the only wrong.
Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members… Self-reliance is its aversion.
There are nine hundred and ninety-nine patrons of virtue to one virtuous man.
Here there are neither Russians nor English, Jews nor Christians, but only those who pursue one aim: to be able to be.
Those who do not observe the movements of their own minds must of necessity be unhappy.
The perception of the sun by an astronomer and by a scientist is far inferior to the seeing of the invisible God and it is inferior to the knowledge that comes from God.
Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth.
Truth comes home to the mind so naturally that when we learn it for the first time, it seems as though we do no more than recall it to our memory.
Let other people labor at debates and difficulties and arguments.
Our rash faults
Make trivial price of serious things we have,
Not knowing them until we know their grave:
Oft our displeasures, to ourselves unjust,
Destroy our friends and after weep their dust:
Our own love waking cries to see what’s done,
While shame full late sleeps out the afternoon.
You will see that in dealing with fools and blockheads, there is only one way of showing your intelligence — by having nothing to do with them. That means of course, that when you go into society, you may now and then feel like a good dancer who gets an invitation to a ball, and on arriving, finds that everyone is lame — with whom is he to dance?
The boundless sea has absorbed the river and its limited waters. Now the river shares in all that the sea has. The sea carries the river along; the river cannot carry itself along. The river has become one with the sea. No, the river does not have all the qualities of the sea, but it is, nonetheless, in the sea.
The knowledge of God without that of man’s misery causes pride. The knowledge of man’s misery without that of God causes despair.
There is a great deal of unmapped country within us which would have to be taken into account in explanation of our gusts and storms.
Our salvation consists wholly in being saved from ourselves.
Somewhere about this time I was very much struck by a talk about the sun, the planets, and the moon. I do not remember how this talk began. But I remember that G. drew a small diagram and tried to explain what he called the “correlation of forces in different worlds.” This was in connection with the previous talk, that is, in connection with the influences acting on humanity. The idea was roughly this: humanity, or more correctly, organic life on earth, is acted upon simultaneously by influences proceeding from various sources and different worlds; influences from the planets, influences from the moon, influences from the sun, influences from the stars. All these influences act simultaneously; one influence predominates at one moment and another influence at another moment. And for man there is a certain possibility of making a choice of influences; in other words, of passing from one influence to another.
Then he realized, I indeed, I am this creation, for I have poured it forth from myself. In that way he became this creation. Verily, he who knows this becomes in this creation a creator.
