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One ought every day at least to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.
The limit of your present understanding is not the limit of your possibilities.
You think it is because I have an income which exempts me from your day-labor, that I waste (as you call it) my time in sun-gazing and star-gazing. You do not know me. If my debts, as they threaten, should consume what money I have, I should live just as I do now: I should eat worse food, and wear a coarser coat, and should wander in a potato patch instead of in the wood — but it is I, and not my twelve hundred dollars a year, that love God.
Drink from your own cistern, and make use of your own resources. You are not merely watering the earth but enlightening human souls.
Be sincere with yourself. Whether men love or hate, admire or despise you, is of but little importance. Speak only what is true, do only what is right.
The One is ever present. Even in those moments when your natural mind (ego) shrouds you in deception and despair, The One is there urging you to light, to love and to Life.
A very little key will open a very heavy door.
How great is the power of truth! Of its own power it can easily defend itself against all the ingenuity of cunning and wisdom of men, and against the treacherous plots of all the world.
We only fail to see the fact that the life we lead is discordant with human nature, because all those horrors among which we quietly live, have come about so gradually that we have not noticed them.
A political victory, a rise in rents, the recovery of your sick or the return of your absent friend, or some other favourable event raises your spirits, and you think good days are preparing for you. Do not believe it. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.
Freedom from what is unwanted by us begins by awakening to what is unknown within us.
There is apart from mere intellect, in the make-up of every superior human identity, a wondrous something that realizes without argument, frequently without what is called education (though I think it the goal and apex of all education deserving the name), an intuition of the absolute balance, in time and space, of the whole of this multifariousness, this revel of fools, and incredible make-believe and general unsettledness, we call the world.
A soul-sight of that divine clue and unseen thread which holds the whole congeries of things, all history and time, and all events, however trivial, however momentous, like a leashed dog in the hand of the hunter. Of such soul-sight and root-centre for the mind mere optimism explains only the surface.
Great men are the true men, the men in whom Nature has succeeded.
All the efforts of the human mind cannot exhaust the essence of a single fly.
And as to you Death, and you bitter hug of mortality, it is idle to try to alarm me…
And as to you Corpse I think you are good manure, but that does not offend me,
I smell the white roses sweet-scented and growing,
I reach to the leafy lips, I reach to the polish’d breasts of melons.
And as to you Life I reckon you are the leavings of many deaths,
(No doubt I have died myself ten thousand times before.)
A man is best off if he is thrown upon his own resources, and can be all in all to himself, and Cicero goes so far as to say that a man who is in this condition cannot fail to be very happy.
One went to the door of the Beloved and knocked.
A voice asked, “Who is there?”
He answered, “It is I.”
The voice said, “There is no room for Me and Thee.”
The door was shut.
After a year of solitude and deprivation he returned and knocked.
A voice from within asked, “Who is there?”
The man said, “It is Thee.”
The door was opened for him.
The bamboo shadows
Sweep the steps
But raise no dust.
When, in some dreadful and ghastly dream, we reach the moment of greatest horror, it awakes us, thereby banishing all the hideous shapes that were born of the night. And life is a dream: when the moment of greatest horror compels us to break it off, the same thing happens.
True religion is the establishment by man of such a relationship to the Infinite Life around him, which, while connecting his life with Infinite Life, and directing his actions, is also in agreement with his reason and with human knowledge.
