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An idea about God is not God.
Great men stand like solitary towers in the city of God, and secret passages, running deep beneath external nature, give their thoughts intercourse with higher intelligences, which strengthens and consoles them, and of which the laborers on the surface do not even dream.
Finally, the mind of man is so constructed that it is taken far more with disguises than with realities.
I call that mind free which is not passively framed by outward circumstances, which is not swept away by the torrent of events, which is not the creature of accidental impulse, but which bends events to its own improvement, and acts from an inward spring, from immutable principles which is has deliberately espoused.
All truth passes through three stages: First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
We must approach this matter in an entirely different manner. It is great and mystical; it is no common thing, nor is it given to every man. Wisdom alone is not enough; a man needs a certain degree of readiness.
How can he remember well his ignorance, which his growth requires, who has so often to use his knowledge?
We are foolish to depend on the society of our fellow-men… they will not aid us… We should seek the truth without hesitation, and, if we refuse it, we show that we value the esteem of men more than the search for truth.
If you are inwardly free from fighting, no one will be able to fight with you.
It is a secret which every intellectual man quickly learns, that beyond the energy of his possessed and conscious intellect he is capable of a new energy… by abandonment to the nature of things; that beside his privacy of power as an individual man, there is a great public power on which he can draw, by unlocking, at all risks, and suffering the ethereal tides to roll and circulate through him; then he is caught up into the life of the Universe.
If he carries out all these rules while he observes himself, a man will record a whole series of very important aspects of his being. To begin with, he will record with unmistakable clearness the fact that his actions, thoughts, feelings, and words are the result of external influences and that nothing comes from himself. He will understand and see that he is in fact an automaton acting under the influences of external stimuli. He will feel his complete mechanicalness. Everything “happens,” he cannot “do” anything. He is a machine controlled by accidental shocks from outside. Each shock calls to the surface one of his “I’s.” A new shock and that ‘I’ disappears and a different one takes its place. Another small change in the environment and again there is a new ‘I.’
It is always with us, but there must be an opening of the heart to it, and though it is always there, yet it is only felt and found by those who are attentive to it, depend upon, and humbly wait for it.
When you are inspired by some great purpose, some extraordinary project, all your thoughts break their bonds. Your mind transcends limitations, your consciousness expands in every direction, and you find yourself in a new, great, and wonderful world. Dormant forces, faculties and talents become alive, and you discover yourself to be a greater person by far than you ever dreamed yourself to be.
There is a remedy for every wrong and a satisfaction for every soul.
The very emergence of the contradiction in our consciousness is at the same time the silent prophecy of its solution… that which knows or feels division or discord must be a unity which transcends division or discord… it is a consciousness in which the contradiction or discord vanishes.
For this is the journey that men make: to find themselves. It doesn’t matter what else they find: fame, fortune, many loves, revenge… when the tickets are collected at the end of the ride, they are tossed in the bin marked failure.
But if a man happens to find himself, the extent of his courage, the limit of his dedication, the position in life from which he can no longer retreat, he has found a mansion he can inhabit with dignity all the days of his life.
To understand things we must have been once in them and then have come out of them; so that first there must be captivity and then deliverance, illusion followed by disillusion, enthusiasm by disappointment. He who is still under the spell, and he who has never felt the spell, are equally incompetent. We only know well what we have first believed, then judged. To understand we must be free, yet not have been always free.
A good disposition I far prefer to gold, for gold is the gift of fortune, while goodness of disposition is the gift of nature. I prefer much rather to be called good than fortunate.
We may quarrel with men about things on Earth, but we never quarrel about the Great Spirit.
Love is ever the beginning of knowledge, as fire is of light.
