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Explore all of the quotations in our Living Book…
Awakening begins when a man realizes that he is going nowhere and does not know where to go.
In faith, man becomes certain that he has himself not in himself.
I can easier teach twenty what were good to be done, than be one of the twenty to follow mine own teaching.
The center of every man’s existence is a dream. Death, disease, and insanity are merely material accidents, like a toothache or a twisted ankle. That these brutal forces always besiege and often capture the citadel does not prove that they are the citadel.
The burden which is well borne becomes light.
Do not look at life’s long sorrow;
See how small each moment’s pain;
God will help thee for to-morrow,
So each day begin again.
If we turn our minds towards the good, it is impossible that little by little the whole soul will not be attracted thereto in spite of itself.
Every further stage of ourselves is within us, above us. Below us lies what we are already, what we have done before. Below us, behind us, is the passive surrender to things, the inertia of the past, the habits of years, and the passive, sensual mind — the mind of the senses — with its sole belief in appearances and passing time. At any point in our lives we are thus between two opposing forces: the force of the realized and the force of the unrealized, what we are and have been, and what we may be. And what we may be is already there, as unhappy feeling, as incompleteness.
This power demands of us what alone is certain and rational and possible… which is possible only in the truth, and, therefore, in the recognition of the truth revealed to us, and the profession of that truth.
Be comforted. Our life is but one day of our Life. Let go!
As you start to walk on the way, the way appears.
Jews call this Word the Law; Christians call it the Logos or the blueprint; Taoists call it the Eternal Tao; Buddhists call it Emptiness or the Great Compassion; Hindus call it Brahman; Sufi Muslims call it the dance; and science speaks of universal theories. But we are all pointing to one underlying truth that we all strive toward in ten thousand ways. We all somehow believe it is a coherent and even a benevolent universe. Maybe that is the very heart of the meaning of faith. It is surely the Perennial Tradition discovered by all people of goodwill and sincere search.
Every nature is contented with itself when it goes on its way well, and a rational nature goes on its way well, when in its thoughts it consents to nothing false… and when it is satisfied with everything that is assigned to it by the common nature.
Whenever opposite views are held with warmth by religious-minded men, we may take it for granted there is some higher truth which embraces both. All high truth is the union of two contradictions.
The walls of rude minds are scrawled all over with facts, with thoughts. They shall one day bring a lantern and read the inscriptions.
Fortune does us neither good nor hurt; she only presents us the matter, and the seed, which our soul, more powerfully than she, turns and applies as she best pleases; being the sole cause and sovereign mistress of her own happy or unhappy condition.
Only let your present and past distress make you feel and acknowledge this twofold great truth: first, that in and of yourself, you are nothing but darkness, vanity, and misery; secondly, that of yourself, you can no more help yourself to light and comfort, than you can create an angel. People at all times can seem to assent to these two truths, but then it is an assent which has no depth or reality, and so is of little or no use, but your condition has opened your heart for a deep and full conviction of these truths. Now give way, I beseech you, to this conviction, and hold these two truths, in the same degree of certainty as you know two and two to be four, and then you are with the prodigal come to yourself, and above half your work is done.
For whilst in one sense we give up self to live the universal and absolute life of reason, yet that to which we thus surrender ourselves is in reality our truer self. The life of absolute truth or reason is not a life that is foreign to us. In yielding to it we are not submitting to an outward and arbitrary law or to an external authority, but to a law that has become our own law, an authority which has become enthroned in the inmost essence of our being.
Nothing is more disgusting than the majority: it consists of a few powerful predecessors, of rogues who adapt themselves, of weak who assimilate themselves, and the masses who imitate without knowing at all what they want.
What your heart thinks great is great. The soul’s emphasis is always right.
