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Men, attached by habit to the existing order, shrink from attempting to change it, therefore they agree to consider this doctrine as a mass of revelations and laws that may be accepted without making any change in one’s life: whereas the doctrine… is not a doctrine of rules for men to obey, but unfolds a new life-conception, meant as a guide for men who are now entering upon a new life, one entirely different from the past.
The world is his who can see through its pretension.
All we have to do is to receive what we are given.
It is only a religious mind, a mind that is enquiring into itself, that is aware of its own movements, its own activity, which is the beginning of self-knowledge — it is only such a mind that is a revolutionary mind. And a revolutionary mind is a mutating mind is the religious mind.
Human history is the long terrible story of a man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.
He who builds upon another man’s ground, loses his mortar and stone.
It is useless for the “self” to try to “purify itself,” or for the “self” to “make a place in itself” for God.
That our sanctification did not depend upon changing our works, but in doing that for God’s sake which we commonly do for our own.
The light of the body is the eye; if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.
There are people who would never be in love if they had never heard of love.
Every step so downward, is a step upward. The man who renounces himself, comes to himself.
It is merely that when a man has found something which he prefers to life, he then for the first time begins to live.
I saw that all things which occasioned me any anxiety or fear had in themselves nothing of good or evil, except in so far as the mind was moved by them.
Mock the time with fairest show:
False face must hide what the false heart doth know.
Each man in his perception of truth is like a traveller who walks by aid of a lantern whose light is cast before him: he does not see what as yet has not been revealed by the beams, he does not see the path he has left behind… but at any given step he sees that which the lantern reveals, and he is always at liberty to choose one side of the road or the other.
How can any external revelation help me unless it is verified by internal experience?
There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same. He that is once admitted to the right of reason is made a freeman of the whole estate. What Plato has thought, he may think; what a saint has felt, he may feel; what at any time has befallen any man, he can understand. Who hath access to this universal mind is a party to all that is or can be done, for this is the only and sovereign agent.
There are varying degrees of spiritual illumination, which accounts both for the varying outlooks to be found among mystics and for the different kinds of glimpses among aspirants. All illuminations and all glimpses free the man from his negative qualities and base nature, but in the latter case only temporarily. He is able as a result, to see into his higher nature. In the first degree, it is as if a window covered with dirt were cleaned enough to reveal a beautiful garden outside it. He is still subject to the activity of thinking, the emotion of joy, and the discrimination between X and Y.
In the next and higher degree, it is as if the window were still more cleaned so that still more beauty is revealed beyond it. Here there are no thoughts to intervene between the seer and the seen. In the third degree, it is as if the window were thoroughly cleaned. Here there is no longer even a rapturous emotion but only a balanced happiness, a steady tranquility which, being beyond the intellect, cannot properly be described by the intellect.
In antiquity those that excelled in warfare first made themselves unconquerable in order to await (the moment when) the enemy could be conquered. Being unconquerable lies with yourself. Being conquerable lies with the enemy.
This fault in us I find,
The error of our eye directs our mind:
What error leads must err; O, then conclude
Minds sway’d by eyes are full of turpitude.