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Explore all of the quotations in our Living Book…
It matters little where a man may be at this moment… the point is whether he is growing.
Man judges all things by his abstractions — good, evil, virtue, crime. His formulas of right are his scales, and his justice is blind. The justice of God sees — in that is everything.
He that will keep a monkey should pay for the glasses he breaks.
Who stands already on heaven’s topmost dome needs not to search for ladders.
I may be asked what I mean by “Inward Spiritual Freedom”… Spiritual freedom is the attribute of a mind in which reason and conscience have begun to act, and which is free through its own energy, through fidelity to the truth, through resistance to temptation… We are in the midst of influences which menace the intellect and heart; and to be free is to withstand and conquer these.
To become attached to the experience of peace is to threaten the true and essential and vital union of our soul with God, above sense and experience in the darkness of a pure and perfect love.
One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.
Those who come to seek truth with such a spirit of love and veneration, to them the Lord of Truth reveals the most wonderful things regarding Truth, Goodness, and Beauty.
Thinking produces noisy and wrong action. Seeing allows silent and right action.
It matters not what our evils are… hardness of heart, covetousness, wrath, pride, and ambition, etc., our remedy is always one and the same, always at hand, always certain and infallible.
We take less pains to be happy than to appear so.
It is therefore exceedingly good and beneficial to us to discover this dark, disordered fire of the soul, because when rightly known and rightly dealt with, it can as well be the foundation of heaven.
Put not yourself into amazement how these things should be: all difficulties are but easy when they are known.
Our life is like a journey in which, as we advance, the landscape takes a different view from that which is presented at first, and changes again, as we come nearer. This is just what happens, especially with our desires. We often find something else, no, something better than what we were looking for… Instead of finding, as we expected, pleasure, happiness, joy, we get experience, insight, knowledge — a real and permanent blessing, instead of a disappearing and illusory one. In their search for gold, the alchemists discovered other things — gunpowder, china, medicines, the laws of nature. There is a sense in which we are all alchemists.
We know what we are, but not what we may be.
Do not look at life’s long sorrow;
See how small each moment’s pain;
God will help thee for to-morrow,
So each day begin again.
Be neither the slave of your impulses and sensations of the moment, nor of an abstract and general plan; be open to what life brings from within and without, and welcome the unforeseen, and give to your life unity, and bring the unforeseen within the lines of your plan. Let what is natural in you raise itself to the level of the spiritual, and let the spiritual become once more natural. Thus will your development be harmonious.
Whatever forms Christianity assumed in later times, however distorted it became, it must be remembered that its introduction was heralded by John the Baptist preaching change of mind as the first step towards “eternal” life. And this change of mind was connected by him with the teaching on the Kingdom of Heaven — an idea so difficult to grasp and so contrary to all sense-thinking and external evidence that it remains a new idea for all time.
How great is the power of truth! Of its own power it can easily defend itself against all the ingenuity of cunning and wisdom of men, and against the treacherous plots of all the world.
Culture, far from giving us freedom, only develops as it advances, new necessities; the fetters of the physical close more tightly around us, so that the fear of loss quenches even the ardent impulse towards improvement, and the maxims of passive obedience are held to be the highest wisdom of life.
