Browse by: Quotation Source | The Seeker | The Search | The Sacred
Explore all of the quotations in our Living Book…
So hath God by rational methods enabled us to love others better than ourselves, and thereby made us the most glorious creatures. Had we not loved ourselves at all, we could never have been obliged to love anything. So that self-love is the basis of all love. But when we do love ourselves, and self-love is satisfied infinitely in all its desires and possible demands, then it is easily led to regard the Benefactor more than itself, and for His sake overflows abundantly to all others. So that God by satisfying my self-love, hath enabled and engaged me to love others.
I am defeated all the time, yet to victory I am born.
Rich, only to be wretched, thy great fortunes
Are made thy chief afflictions.
You give but little when you give of your possessions. It is when you give of yourself that you truly give.
Who knows the mind has the key to all things else.
So long, therefore, as we are not agitated by passions which are contrary to our nature, so long is the power of the soil by which it seeks to understand things not impeded; and so long, therefore, has it the power of forming clear and distinct ideas.
All things must be set right in yourself first, before you can rightly assist others towards the attaining to the same state.
Make not a close friend of a melancholy, sad person. He will be sure to increase your adversity and decrease your good fortune. He goes always heavily loaded, and you must bear half.
I call that mind free which jealously guards its intellectual rights and powers, which calls no man master, which does not content itself with a passive or hereditary faith, which opens itself to light whencesoever it may come, which receives new truth as an angel from heaven, which, whilst consulting others, inquires still more of the oracle within itself, and uses instructions from abroad not to supersede, but to quicken and exalt, its own energies.
Water flows continually into the ocean
But the ocean is never disturbed.
Desire flows into the mind of the seer
But he is never disturbed.
The seer knows peace.
Heroism works in contradiction to the voice of mankind, and in contradiction, for a time, to the voice of the great and good. Heroism is an obedience to a secret impulse of an individual’s character.
The greatest man is he who chooses right with the most invincible resolution.
We may be pretty certain that persons whom all the world treats ill deserve entirely the treatment they get. The world is a looking-glass, and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face. Frown at it, and it will in turn look sourly upon you; laugh at it and with it, and it is a jolly, kind companion.
Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.
I had come to the conclusion a long time ago that there was no escape from the labyrinth of contradictions in which we live except by an entirely new road, unlike anything hitherto known or used by us.
The mind alone cannot be exiled.
Cannot a strong interest turn difficulty into pleasure? Let the love of truth, of which I have spoken, be awakened, and obstacles in the way to it will whet, not discourage, the mind, and inspire a new delight into its acquisition.
Love is infallible; it has no errors, for all errors are the want of love.
There is no trifling with nature; it is always true, dignified, and just; it is always in the right, and the faults and errors belong to us. Nature defies incompetence, but reveals its secrets to the competent, the truthful, and the pure.
Someone once asked Dhu’l-Nun, “When does the Sufi reach his goal?”
He said, “When he is as he was where he was before he was.”
