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It is better that one should not vow rather than to vow and not pay.
It is the recognition or non-recognition of these principles that a man finds or fails to find freedom.
By faith it appears that in order to understand the meaning of life I must renounce my reason, the very thing for which alone a meaning is required.
To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.
Think but this, and all is mended:
That you have but slumbered here,
While these visions did appear.
From this difference between the new and the old man, which is a difference as real as that between heaven and earth, several lessons of great instruction may be learned.
The disciples said to him, “Tell us what our end will be.” Jesus said, “If you haven’t found the beginning, why ask about the end? For where the beginning is, the end is also. Blessed are those who stand at the beginning, for they will know the end, and they will not taste death.”
No act is aloof. Your most secret deed is invisibly reported, its good being protected in joy, its evil destroyed in pain.
I have said that people are rendered sociable by their inability to endure solitude, that is to say, their own society. They become sick of themselves. Their mind is wanting in flexibility; it has no movement of its own, so they try to give it some — by drink, for instance… They are always looking for some form of excitement, of the strongest kind they can bear — the excitement of being with people of like nature with themselves; and if they fail in this, their mind sinks by its own weight, and they fall into grievous lethargy.
O villain, villain, smiling, damned villain!
My tables — meet it is I set it down,
That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain;
At least I’m sure it may be so in Denmark.
The fox condemns the trap, not himself.
Be like the pearl oyster. There is a pretty Indian fable to the effect that if it rains when the star Svati is in the ascendant, and a drop of rain falls into an oyster, that drop will become a pearl. The oysters know this, so they come to the surface when that star shines, and wait to catch the precious raindrop. When one falls into the shell, quickly the oyster closes it and dives down to the bottom of the sea, there to patiently develop the drop into the pearl. We should be like that. First hear, then understand, and then, leaving all distractions, shut our minds to outside influences, and devote ourselves to developing the truth within us.
We are saved by hope, but hope that is seen is not hope, for who hopeth for that which he seeth?
I imagined that unity of being could be reached within the customary state of consciousness. I believed, in other words, that a radical change of being could take place as one was, merely through some adjustments. This is probably what most of us think, for we do not realize that in order to change anything in ourselves everything else must change, lest by trying to change one thing we create wrong results in other directions. Change of being is not a patchwork process. All sorts of minor modifications are no doubt possible in people without necessarily harmful results.
Nothing does so establish the mind amidst the rollings and turbulence of present things, as a look above them and a look beyond them — above them, to the steady and good hand by which they are ruled, and beyond them, to the sweet and beautiful end to which, by that hand, they will be brought.
Our indifference to the truth is due to our determination to follow our desires. “It is of no importance,” men say, “to know where the truth is, since we know what will give us pleasure.”
Enter yourself, let self-honesty turn you in the right direction, after which self-awareness lives your life for you. Wishing for something other than darkness is already a bit of light. Have no fear of exposing the illusion that your present world is a false world, for the end of the old reveals the new. Change starts with even the dim realization of being betrayed by our own faulty thoughts. Self-renewal occurs spontaneously when habitual thoughts are dropped. Few people realize how little truth they can take, but those who do will become new.
The perfect man employs his mind as a mirror. It grasps nothing. It refuses nothing. It receives, but does not keep.
Man is man, and master of his fate.
Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members… Self-reliance is its aversion.
