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Explore all of the quotations in our Living Book…
For if Life were questioned a thousand years and asked, “Why Live?”, and if there were an answer, it could be no more than this: “I live only to live!” And that is because Life is its own reason for being, springs from its own source, and goes on and on, without ever asking why — just because it is life. Thus, if you ask a genuine person, that is, one who acts (uncalculatingly) from his heart, “Why are you doing that?”, he will reply in the only possible way: “I do it because I do it!”
All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.
If you made a list of everything you own, everything you think of as you, everything you prefer, that list would be the distance between you and the living truth.
Happy is he who bears within himself a god, an ideal of beauty, and obeys it; ideal of art, of science, of patriotism, of the virtues symbolized by the Gospels. These are living sources of great thoughts and great acts. All are lighted by reflection from the infinite.
More radiant than the sun, purer than the snow, subtler than the ether, is the Self, the spirit within my heart. I am that Self, that Self am I.
To come to the pleasure you have not
You must go by a way in which you enjoy not.
To come to the knowledge you have not
You must go by a way in which you know not.
To come to the possession you have not
You must go by a way in which you possess not.
To come to be what you are not
You must go by a way in which you are not.
Thou that has given so much to me, give one thing more: a grateful heart. Not thankful when it please me, as if thy blessings had spare days. But such a heart whose pulse may be thy praise.
The greatest of all crosses is self. If we die in part every day, we shall have but little to do on the last. These little daily deaths will destroy the power of the final dying.
The divine and conceptual scriptures are compared with dew, with water, with milk, with wine, and with honey, for they have the power like water to produce life, like milk to give growth, like vine to revive, like honey both to purify and preserve.
If a man would find the Key of Knowledge, let him find himself.
Time present and time past are both perhaps present in time future. And time future contained in time past.
But don’t be satisfied with stories, how things have gone with others. Unfold your own myth, without complicated explanation, so everyone will understand the passage. We have opened you.
I am done with great things and big things, great institutions and big success, and I am for those tiny, invisible molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, yet which, if you give them time, will rend the hardest monuments of man’s pride.
God does not die on the day we cease to believe in a personal deity. But we die on the day when our lives cease to be illumined by the steady radiance of wonder renewed daily, the source of which is beyond all reason.
Real ‘I’ is the Messiah, for whom the creature is waiting.
Easy is the descent into the lower world. Night and day the door of glowing dis stands open. But to recall thy steps and pass out to the upper air, this is the task, this is the work.
This mystical perception seems to be one in which all the senses unite into one.
Emulate your forefathers, your ancestors… You see, their words remain in their writings open, that you may read and copy their wisdom.
Very religious people always shock slightly religious people by their blasphemous attitude to religion… and it was precisely for blasphemy that Jesus was crucified.
Take a thorn-bush and sprinkle it for a whole year with water — it will yield nothing but thorns. Take a date-tree, leave it without culture, and it will always produce dates.
