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Great men stand like solitary towers in the city of God, and secret passages, running deep beneath external nature, give their thoughts intercourse with higher intelligences, which strengthens and consoles them, and of which the laborers on the surface do not even dream.
If you don’t get what you want, you suffer. If you get what you don’t want, you suffer. Even when you get exactly what you want, you still suffer because you can’t hold on to it forever. Your mind is your predicament. It wants to be free of change, free of pain, free of the obligations of life and death. But change is a law, and no amount of pretending will alter that reality.
Remember that the ruling faculty is invincible; when self-collected it is satisfied with itself… therefore the mind which is free from passions is a citadel, for man has nothing more secure to which he can fly for safety.
If we subject everything to reason, our religion will have nothing mysterious or supernatural. If we violate the principles of reason, our religion will be absurd and ridiculous.
I cannot be
Mine own, nor any thing to any, if
I be not thine.
The sage attends to the inner, and not to the outer.
Gentleness in the gait is what simplicity is in the dress. Violent gestures or quick movements inspire involuntary disrespect.
Grace is not bestowed according to human merits; otherwise grace would no longer be grace. For grace is so designated because it is given gratuitously.
Hardly one in ten thousand will have the strength of mind to ask himself seriously and earnestly, “Is that true?”
Be ahead of all parting, as though it were already behind you, like the winter that hast gone by. For among those winters there is one so endlessly winter that only by wintering through it will your heart survive.
The love of God, unutterable and perfect, flows into a pure soul the way light rushes into a transparent object.
If we could penetrate to the eternal reality of our own being we would find the one and only solution for every situation — in the right sense of our own existence — primarily in itself.
His overthrow heap’d happiness upon him;
For then, and not till then, he felt himself,
And found the blessedness of being little:
And, to add greater honours to his age
Than man could give him, he died fearing God.
Oft expectation fails, and most oft there
Where most it promises, and oft it hits
Where hope is coldest and despair most fits.
Man’s true nature, his true good, true virtue, and true religion, are things of which the knowledge is inseparable.
All we taste, against all we lack, is like a single drop of water against the whole sea… for we feed upon His Immensity, which we cannot devour, and we yearn after His Infinity, which we cannot attain.
If the world goes against truth, then Athanasius goes against the world.
Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.
Our minds possess by nature an insatiable desire to know the truth.
For in our searchings are found all our desires, and we gain victory over our worlds.
