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Explore all of the quotations in our Living Book…
Let fortune do her worst, whatever she makes us lose, so long as she never makes us lose our honesty and independence.
Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel. Unfortunately, report cards ordinarily reveal how much a vessel has been filled rather than the extent to which a flame has been kindled.
If we would put some slight stress on ourselves at the beginning, then afterwards we should be able to do all things with ease and joy.
There is an old simile in India that if you place a cup of milk before a Raja Hamsa (swan) with plenty of water in it, he will take all the milk and leave the water. In that way we should take what is of value in knowledge, and leave the dross.
There comes for ever something between us and what we deem our happiness.
Your friends will tell you that they are sincere; your enemies are really so. Let your enemies’ criticism be like a bitter medicine, to be used as a means of self-knowledge.
No man can see over his own height. Let me explain what I mean. You cannot see in another man any more than you have in yourself. Your own level strictly determines the extent to which he comes within your understanding. If your intelligence is unawakened, mental qualities in another, even though they be of the highest kind, will have no effect on you at all… his higher mental qualities will no more exist for you than colors exist for those who cannot see.
I pray thee, O God, that I may be beautiful within.
Bring all opposites inside yourself and reconcile them. Understand that you are everywhere: on the land, in the sea, in the sky. Realize that you haven’t yet been begotten, that you are still in the womb, that you are young, that you are old, that you are dead, that you are in the world beyond the grave. Hold all this in your mind, all times and places, all substances and qualities and magnitudes. Then you can perceive God.
What do you suppose will satisfy the soul except to walk free and own no superior?
The saints are the living ones, and the living ones are the saints.
Men go abroad to wonder at the heights of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses of the rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motions of the stars, and they pass by themselves without wondering.
The external, restless, useless activity which consists in establishing and adapting the external forms resulting from the change of consciousness, hides from men that essential, inner activity which alone can ameliorate their lives. And this superstition, more than anything else, hinders the general amelioration of human life.
The entire root of your problem is that you cannot get outside of yourself.
A hundred thousand sheep are not more instructive than one sheep.
Love, true love, which is the very essence of the human soul — that love which is revealed by Christ’s teaching — precludes the possibility of any idea of any kind of violence.
Notwithstanding the sight of all those miseries which wring us, and threaten our destruction, we have still an instinct that we cannot repress, which elevates us above our sorrows.
I can live no longer by thinking.
There are plenty to follow our Lord half-way, but not the other half. They will give up possessions, friends and honors, but it touches them too closely to disown themselves.
To become attached to the experience of peace is to threaten the true and essential and vital union of our soul with God, above sense and experience in the darkness of a pure and perfect love.
