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Explore all of the quotations in our Living Book…
God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.
[This philosophy we speak of is] Cheerful and yet profound, like an October afternoon.
God is not attained by a process of addition to anything in the soul, but by a process of subtraction.
All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.
No announcements tell the world that he has come into enlightenment. No heralds blow the trumpets proclaiming man’s greatest victory — over himself. This is in fact the quietest moment of his whole life.
Whilst a man seeks good ends, he is strong by the whole strength of nature… The perception of this law of laws awakens in the mind a sentiment which we call the religious sentiment, and which makes our highest happiness. Wonderful is its power to charm and to command. It is a mountain air.
The center of every man’s existence is a dream. Death, disease, and insanity are merely material accidents, like a toothache or a twisted ankle. That these brutal forces always besiege and often capture the citadel does not prove that they are the citadel.
That which I know immediately and intuitively transcends in certitude all other knowledge, for the certainty of it is bound up with the mind’s certainty of itself. I can no more doubt what I thus know than I can doubt my own existence.
It was through the feeling of wonder that men now and at first began to philosophize.
You will never come to harm in the practice of virtue.
Without effort, he rules all things by the power of his mind.
The man who has no refuge in himself, who lives, so to speak, in his front rooms, in the outer whirlwind of things and opinions, is not properly speaking a personality at all; he is not distinct, free, original, a cause — in a word, someone. He is one of the crowd, a taxpayer, an elector, an anonymity, but not a man.
Seek here… “there” doesn’t exist.
To the generality of men you cannot give a stronger hint for them to impose upon you than by imposing upon yourself.
If there is so much friction, violence, and tension in the world, it is only because so many individual persons themselves are inwardly experiencing these things… If there is so little real peace in the world, it is only because there is so little real peace in the individuals who live in the world.
Why do you take by force what you could obtain by love?
Human improvement is from within outwards.
The majority of men are, as it were, suspended in the air, like toy balloons; every breath of wind moves them.
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow; a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
If the mind is happy, not only the body but the whole world will be happy. So one must find out how to become happy oneself. Wanting to reform the world without discovering one’s true self is like trying to cover the world with leather to avoid the pain of walking on stones and thorns. It is much simpler to wear shoes.
