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Explore all of the quotations in our Living Book…
Everything lies in relationship, in how you relate yourself to things. You cannot change the thing itself but you can change your relationship to it.
We become so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others that at last we are disguised to ourselves.
Nature has not said to me, “Be not poor,” still less, “Be rich.” She calls out to me, “Be independent!”
We only fail to see the fact that the life we lead is discordant with human nature, because all those horrors among which we quietly live, have come about so gradually that we have not noticed them.
I exist as I am — that is enough. If no other in the world be aware, I sit content.
When people are made righteous by philosophy they have stored help for themselves and inward perception which leads to reverence for God.
The eagle never lost so much time as when he submitted to learn of the crow.
There is an endless Kingdom to be inhabited.
One must strive to become what one is.
Drink from your own cistern, and make use of your own resources. You are not merely watering the earth but enlightening human souls.
The individual soul should seek for an intimate union with the soul of the universe.
Intuition is the clear conception of the whole at once.
Be a philosopher… but, amidst all your philosophy, be still a man.
However much we have dulled ourselves with hypocrisy, and dulled ourselves with the self-suggestion resulting from hypocrisy, nothing can destroy the absolute certainty of that simple and clear truth that no exterior effort can provide us with security.
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.
That which hath been is now, and that which is to be hath already been.
Nothing is so easy as to deceive one’s self, for what we wish to believe, we readily believe, but such expectations are often inconsistent with the real state of things.
The more time we spend considering the shortcomings of others, the smaller a person we become.
Regarding that which happens in harmony with nature, we ought to blame neither gods, for they do nothing wrong either voluntarily or involuntarily, nor men, for they do nothing wrong except unconsciously. Consequently, we should blame no one.
The fox condemns the trap, not himself.