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Explore all of the quotations in our Living Book…
For each believes his lamp to be the light of day!
Morality or the moral life may be described as that solution of the contradiction between man’s higher and lower nature which is accomplished by the transformation of the lower into the organ or expression of the higher.
Who would not poverty for riches yield? A hovel sell to buy a treasure-field?
To know means to know all. Not to know all means not to know. In order to know all, it is only necessary to know a little. But in order to know this little, it is first necessary to know pretty much.
He who learns the rules of wisdom, without conforming to them in his life, is like a man who labors in his field, but did not sow.
The great law of culture is: Let each become all that he was created capable of being; expand, if possible, to his full growth; resisting all impediments, casting off all foreign, especially all noxious adhesions, and show himself at length in his own shape and stature, be these what they may.
What kind of God would He be if He did not count the blinks of your eyes and is in absolute awe of their movements? What a God… What a God we have.
It takes a wise man to discover a wise man.
I deny the lawfulness of telling a lie to a sick man for fear of alarming him; you have no business with consequences, you are to tell the truth.
Does a philosopher seek people to come and hear him? Does he not, rather, by his own nature, attract those who will be enriched by him? He is like the warming sun. What physician seeks for men to come and be healed?
The sovereign good of a man is a mind that subjects all things to itself, and is itself subject to nothing. Such a man’s pleasures are modest and reserved, and it may be a question whether he goes to heaven or heaven comes to him.
When a man begins to know himself he is no longer a machine. He may, indeed, even become a man.
But cruel are the times, when we are traitors
And do not know ourselves, when we hold rumour
From what we fear, yet know not what we fear,
But float upon a wild and violent sea
Each way and none.
If you seek, how is that different from pursuing sound and form? If you don’t seek, how are you different from earth, wood, or stone? You must seek without seeking.
When admitting, “I just don’t know the answer,” you are doing something far more profound than you think. You place yourself at the foot of the stairs that leads upward to a world far higher than the intellect. When saying, “I just don’t know the answer,” you are coming to an end of the self-conceit and self-deceit that occupies the level of the intellect. You have qualified yourself for leaving the self-centered world and approaching the lofty universal world.
Only that day dawns to which we are awake.
The stakes are high for real prayer.
You must gamble yourself
and be willing to lose.
When you have done this,
and your self shakes off
what you believed your self to be,
then no prayer remains,
only a sparkle of the eyes.
Knower and known are one.
If you penetrate the center of time and space,
You can bypass the addictions of the world,
You can become the world yourself.
Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.
Another thing that people must sacrifice is their suffering. It is very difficult also to sacrifice one’s suffering. A man will renounce any pleasures you like but he will not give up his suffering. Man is made in such a way that he is never so much attached to anything as he is to his suffering. And it is necessary to be free from suffering. No one who is not free from suffering, who has not sacrificed his suffering, can work. Later on a great deal must be said about suffering. Nothing can be attained without suffering, but at the same time one must begin by sacrificing suffering. Now, decipher what this means.
Sharing in the divine fullness is such that it makes whoever achieves it ever greater, more illimitable, so as never to cease growing, because the spring of all reality flows ceaselessly. The being of anyone who shares in it is increased in grandeur by all that springs up within, so that the capacity for receiving grows along with the abundance of good gifts received.
