Browse by: Quotation Source | The Seeker | The Search | The Sacred
Explore all of the quotations in our Living Book…
Conversion is no repairing of the old building; but it takes all down, and erects a new structure… Conversion is a deep work, a heart-work; it turns all upside down, and makes a man be in a new world. It goes throughout with men — throughout the mind, throughout the members, throughout the motions of the whole life.
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.
Love is the one supreme duty and good. That love is wisdom and purity and valour and peace, and its infinite sorrow is infinitely better than the world’s richest joy.
Anyone writing a creative work knows that you open, you yield yourself, and the book talks to you and builds itself. To a certain extent, you become the carrier of something that is given to you from what have been called the Muses — or, in biblical language, “God.” This is no fancy. It is a fact. Since the inspiration comes from the unconscious, and since the unconscious minds of the people of any single small society have much in common, what the shaman or seer brings forth is something that is waiting to be brought forth in everyone. So when one hears the seer’s story, one responds, “Aha! This is my story. This is something that I had always wanted to say but haven’t been able to say.”
“Know thyself” is one of the most useful and comprehensive precepts in the whole moral system, and it is well known in how great a veneration this maxim was held by the ancients.
Think of your own faults the first part of the night when you are awake, and of the faults of others the latter part of the night when you are asleep.
Happy is the man to whom Heaven has given a morsel of bread without laying him under the obligation of thanking any other for it than Heaven itself.
There are moods in which we court suffering, in the hope that here, at least, we shall find reality, sharp peaks and edges of truth. But it turns out to be scene-painting and counterfeit. The only thing grief has taught me is to know how shallow it is.
A man would do well to carry a pencil in his pocket, and write down the thoughts of the moment. Those that come unsought for are commonly the most valuable, and should be retained.
The well-cultivated soul has the Logos as its King.
If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading.
Speak the truth, and all nature and all spirits help you with unexpected furtherance.
The beast you ride is your various appetites,
change your wantings. When you prune
weak branches, the remaining fruit
get tastier. Lust can be redirected,
so that even when it takes you backward,
it goes toward shelter.
A strong intention can make “two oceans wide”
be the size of a blanket, or “seven hundred years”
the time it takes to walk to someone you love.
The first virtue is to restrain the tongue. He approaches nearest to the gods who knows how to be silent, even though he is in the right.
It matters little where a man may be at this moment… the point is whether he is growing.
There arises in us the dawn of a Knowledge of Truth.
One would be apt to think, from the murmurs of impatient mortals, that God owed them a recompense before they had deserved it, and that He was obliged to reward their virtue beforehand. No, let us first be virtuous, and rest assured we shall sooner or later be happy. Let us not require the prize before we have won the victory.
Nothing is ever really lost, or can be lost, no birth, identity, form — no object in the world, nor life, nor any visible thing; appearance must not foil, nor shifted sphere confuse thy brain. Ample are time and space — ample the fields of Nature.
Devote six years to your work, but in the seventh go into solitude or among strangers so that your friends, by remembering what you were, do not prevent you from being what you have become.
The important thing is this: To be able at any moment to sacrifice that which we are for what we could become.
