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Explore all of the quotations in our Living Book…
I will not move until I have the highest command… Your virtuous projects, so called, do not cheer me. I know that which shall come will cheer me. If I cannot work, at least I need not lie. All that is clearly due today is not to lie.
Renouncing the honors at which the world aims, I desire only to know the truth… and to the maximum of my power, I exhort all other men to do the same.
In the adversity of our best friends, we often find something which does not displease us.
No one rises above who he or she has been without first having fallen down.
Obedience is, indeed, founded on a kind of freedom, else it would become mere subjugation.
If we do depend on others psychologically, we become secondhand people; which we are. The whole history of mankind is in us… and we don’t know how to read that… You’re not the reader… you are the book. When you read the book as a reader it has no meaning. But if you are the book, and the book is telling you; showing you the story, then you’ll not depend on a single person. Then one will be a light to one’s self.
The difficulty is that we do not make a world of our own, but fall into institutions already made.
A hundred thousand sheep are not more instructive than one sheep.
She followed the firefly, which, like herself, was seeking the way out. If it did not know the way, it was yet light; and, because all light is one, any light may serve to guide to more light.
The wish to untie, through understanding of their true nature, the chains of selfishness and sensuality — this is the yearning for freedom.
A hundred thousand tongues may discourse to you about the sweetness of honey, but you can never have knowledge of it except by taste.
The mood of one who, seeing himself carried swiftly towards an event of mighty import, has nothing to do but wait — the mood in which philosophy vests an even-minded man with the utmost calm, and is ever so serviceable.
There are plenty to follow our Lord half-way, but not the other half. They will give up possessions, friends and honors, but it touches them too closely to disown themselves.
So, in regard to disagreeable and formidable things, prudence does not consist in evasion or flight, but in courage. He who wishes to walk in the most peaceful parts of life with any serenity must screw himself up to resolution. Let him front the object of his worst apprehension, and his stoutness will commonly make his fear groundless.
The work an unknown good man has done is like a vein of water flowing hidden underground, secretly making the ground green.
Be teachable. That is the whole secret.
Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted, nor to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider.
The silence that accepts merit as the most natural thing in the world, is the highest applause.
Everything which compromises the future or destroys my inner liberty, which enslaves me to things or obliges me to be other than I could and ought to be… hurts me.
The courage of truth is the first qualification for philosophic studies.
