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Explore all of the quotations in our Living Book…
It’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.
He truly engages in battle who endeavours to surmount all the difficulties and errors which prevent him from reaching the knowledge of truth.
The way of love is not a subtle argument.
The door there is devastation.
Birds make great sky-circles of their freedom. How do they learn it?
They fall, and falling, they’re given wings.
One of the most widespread superstitions is that every man has his own special definite qualities: that he is kind, cruel, wise, stupid, energetic, apathetic, and so on. Men are not like that. We may say of a man that he is more often kind than cruel, more often wise than stupid, more often energetic than apathetic, or the reverse; but it would not be true to say of one man that he is kind and wise, of another that he is bad and stupid. And yet we always classify mankind in this way. And this is false. Men are like rivers: the water is the same in one and all; but every river is narrow here, more rapid there, here slower, there broader, now clear, now dull, now cold, now warm. It is the same with men. Every man bears in himself the germs of every human quality; but sometimes one quality manifests itself, sometimes another, and the man often becomes unlike himself, while still remaining the same man.
He is free who lives as he wishes to live. He is the man who cannot suffer injury, who cannot be hindered or compelled, whose impulses are not blocked, whose desires attain their purpose, who does not fall into whatever he wishes to avoid… So, no wicked man lives like this, and so he is not free.
Human life changes not from the alteration of external forms, but only from the internal work of each man upon himself.
If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is: infinite.
“Is there anything that I can do to make myself enlightened?”
“As little as you can do to make the sun rise in the morning.”
“Then of what use are the spiritual exercises you prescribe?”
“To make sure you are not asleep when the sun begins to rise.”
Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space lies our freedom and power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and freedom.
You cannot think about yourself and be yourself at the same time.
I am this world and I eat this world. Who knows this, knows.
Fear is the parent of cruelty.
We are too fond of our own will. We want to be doing what we fancy mighty things, but the great point is to do small things, when called to do them, in a right spirit.
He who reforms himself has done more towards reforming the public than a crowd of noisy, impotent patriots.
Once you start to awaken, no one can ever claim you again for the old patterns. Now you realize how precious your time here is. You are no longer willing to squander your essence on undertakings that do not nourish your true self. Your patience grows thin with tired talk and dead language. You see through the rosters of expectation which promise you safety and the confirmation of your outer identity. Now you are impatient for growth, willing to put yourself in the way of change. You want your work to become an expression of your gift. You want your relationship to voyage beyond the pallid frontiers to where the danger of transformation dwells. You want your God to be wild and to call you to where your destiny awaits.
If the world goes against truth, then Athanasius goes against the world.
Self-interest speaks all sorts of tongues, and plays all sorts of roles, even that of disinterestedness.
All the Messengers of God are the same and yet they are many; that God manifests in his Messengers, but that they are not God.
There are not different truths in the world, for truth is one and the same at all times and in every place.
In proportion as our own mind is enlarged, we discover a greater number of men of originality. Common-place people see no difference between one man and another.