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Despite the many differences that seem to exist between peoples the world over — regardless of culture, tradition, environment, or heredity — there is but one seeker, one search, and one sacred object of our desire. The celestial source of this sacred being doesn’t just live within us… we are, in fact, one with it.
That which you do not understand when you read, you will understand in the day of your visitation, for many secrets of religion are not perceived til they be felt, and are not felt but in the day of calamity.
Only love overcomes the fragmentation of human nature.
It is wonderful, Lord! It is wonderful, Lord! It is as if, Lord, one might set upright that which had been upturned, or might reveal what was hidden, or might point out the path to one who had gone astray, or might bring an oil lamp into the darkness so that those with eyes might see material shapes.
And forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair.
Enthusiasm gives life to what is invisible.
The being who has attained harmony, and every being may attain it, has found his place in the order of the universe and represents the divine thought as clearly as a flower or a solar system. Harmony seeks nothing outside itself. It is what it ought to be; it is the expression of right, order, law and truth; it is greater than time, and represents eternity.
God must act and pour himself into you the moment He finds you ready. Don’t imagine that God can be compared to an earthly carpenter, who acts or doesn’t act, as he wishes… who can will to do something or leave it undone, according to his pleasure. It is not that way with God: where and when God finds you ready, He must act and overflow into you, just as when the air is clear and pure, the sun must overflow into it and cannot refrain from doing that.
I know that for the right practice of it (the presence of the Lord) the heart must be empty of all other things, because God will possess the heart alone, and as He cannot possess it alone without emptying it of all besides, so neither can he act there, and do in it what he pleases, unless it be left vacant to Him.
Horses and oxen have four feet. That is natural. Place a halter on the head of a horse, or a rope through the nose of an ox. This is unnatural.
The bamboo shadows
Sweep the steps
But raise no dust.
Nothing affects the heart like that which is purely from itself, and of its own nature.
Come hither, eat your bread with joy, that is the mystical bread.
The longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth: that God governs in the affairs of men.
The Indian believes profoundly in silence — the sign of a perfect equilibrium. Silence is the absolute poise or balance of body, mind and spirit. The man who preserves his self-hood is ever calm and unshaken by the storms of existence. What are the fruits of silence? They are self control, true courage or endurance, patience, dignity and reverence. Silence is the cornerstone of character.
A humble man is not afraid of failure. In fact he is not afraid of anything, even of himself, since perfect humility implies perfect confidence in the power of God, before Whom no other power has any meaning and for Whom there is no such thing as an obstacle.
God is intelligence occupied with knowing itself.
The idea of God is the idea of our own spiritual natures enlarged to infinity.
The soul, when using the body as an instrument of perception — that is to say, when using the sense of sight and hearing, or some other sense — for the meaning of perceiving through the body is perceiving through the senses — is dragged by the body through the region of the changeable (the temporal), and wanders about and is confused. The world spins round her. She is like a drunkard when she touches change… But when, returning into herself she reflects, then she passes into the region of Eternity.
Listen! The Mighty Being is awake, and doth with His eternal motion make, a sound like thunder — everlastingly.
God, the divine Principle of man, and man in God’s likeness are inseparable, harmonious, and eternal. God is the parent mind and man is God’s spiritual offspring.
Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.
Humility like darkness reveals the heavenly lights.
God is good, and He wishes a fulfillment for beings in the universe that they also may enjoy bliss and become sons — that they may enter into the psychology of the Being who created the World.
Without courage, there cannot be truth, and without truth there can be no other virtue.
One Song
What is praised is one, so the praise is one too,
many jugs being poured into a huge basin.
All religions, all this singing, one song.
The differences are just illusion and vanity.
Sunlight looks a little different
on this wall than it does on that wall,
and a lot different on this other one,
but it is still one light.
We have borrowed these clothes,
these time-and-space personalities,
from a light, and when we praise,
we are pouring them back in.
