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To understand things we must have been once in them and then have come out of them; so that first there must be captivity and then deliverance, illusion followed by disillusion, enthusiasm by disappointment. He who is still under the spell, and he who has never felt the spell, are equally incompetent. We only know well what we have first believed, then judged. To understand we must be free, yet not have been always free.
At the still point of the turning world, neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
All truth passes through three stages: First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
I beg you to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
No bird soars too high, if he soars with his own wings.
The Kingdom of Heaven lies in the space between two thoughts.
Morality or the moral life may be described as that solution of the contradiction between man’s higher and lower nature which is accomplished by the transformation of the lower into the organ or expression of the higher.
Prove all things; hold fast that which is good.
There is nothing worse
than thinking you are well enough.
More than anything, self-complacency
blocks the workmanship.
Put your vileness up to a mirror and weep.
Get that self-satisfaction flowing out of you!
All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree.
As to the thirst after knowledge, it is an old law that we all get whatever we want. None of us can get anything other than what we fix our hearts upon… The success sometimes may come immediately, but we must be ready to wait patiently even for what may look like an infinite length of time. The student who sets out with such a spirit of perseverance will surely find success and realization at last.
That which is within a man, not that which lies beyond his vision, is the main factor in what is about to befall him.
Perhaps, for many of us, all experience merely defines, so to speak, the shape of that gap where our love of God ought to be. It is not enough. It is something. If we cannot “practice the presence of God,” it is something to practice the absence of God, to become increasingly aware of our unawareness.
At this elevation there is no effort, no struggle.
He truly engages in battle who endeavours to surmount all the difficulties and errors which prevent him from reaching the knowledge of truth.
Human anguish is the product of the loss by man of his true identity.
I wish to be a true and free man.
To learn to look away from oneself is necessary in order to see many things.
It is useless for the “self” to try to “purify itself,” or for the “self” to “make a place in itself” for God.
Learn to know thyself.
Who knows himself, knows his Lord.
