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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.
The longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth: that God governs in the affairs of men.
To be united with the Beloved is to love all, for in all dwelleth the Beloved.
You grieve for those for whom you should not grieve. The wise grieve neither for the living nor the dead. Never at any time was I not, nor thou, nor these princes of man, nor shall we ever cease to be. The unreal has no being, the real never ceases to be.
A man contains all that is needful to his government within himself. He is made a law unto himself. All real good or evil that can befall him must be from himself… The purpose of life seems to be to acquaint man with himself. He is not to live to the future as described to him, but to live in the real future by living to the real present. The highest revelation is that God is in every man.
But if then you notice that it is great, rejoice because of this, for what (ask yourself) would solitude be that had no greatness. There is but one solitude, and that is great, and not easy to bear, and to almost everybody come hours when they would gladly exchange it for any sort of intercourse, however banal and cheap, for the semblance of some slight accord with the first comer, with the unworthiest… But perhaps those are the very hours when solitude grows, for its growing is painful as the growing of boys and sad as the beginning of spring-times. But that must not mislead you. The necessary thing is after all but this: solitude, great inner solitude. Going into oneself and for hours meeting no one — this one must be able to attain.
I never think upon eternity without receiving great comfort. For I say to myself, “How could my soul grasp the idea of everylastingness, if the two were not related in some way?”
Happiness lies in the consciousness we have of it, and by no means in the way the future keeps its promises.
I am this world and I eat this world. Who knows this, knows.
God related to Catherine of Siena: “Do you know, daughter, who you are and who I am? If you know these two things you will have beatitude within your grasp. You are she who is not, and I am He who is.”
Truth is truth
To th’end of reck’ning.
Man’s true nature, his true good, true virtue, and true religion, are things of which the knowledge is inseparable.
What your heart thinks great is great. The soul’s emphasis is always right.
Nothing affects the heart like that which is purely from itself, and of its own nature.
One of the most wonderful things in nature is a glance… it transcends speech… it is the bodily symbol of identity.
Though slowly and with pain, the objects of our affections change, as the objects of thought do. There are moments when the affections rule and absorb the man, and make his happiness dependent on a person or persons. But in health, the mind is presently seen again, its overarching vault, bright with galaxies of immutable lights, and the warm loves and fears that swept over us as clouds, must lose their finite character, and blend with God, to attain their own perfection. But we need not fear that we can lose any thing by the progress of the soul. The soul may be trusted to the end. That which is so beautiful and attractive as these relations, must be succeeded and supplanted only by what is more beautiful, and so on forever.
The contemplation of celestial things will make a man both speak and think more sublimely and magnificently when he descends to human affairs.
Love sees what no eye sees; love hears what no ear hears.
It is the Way of Heaven not to strive, and yet it knows how to overcome; not to speak, and yet it knows how to win a response.
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. If it is above us, it is also within us. In yielding to it we are not submitting to an outward and arbitrary law or to an external authority, but to a law which has become our own law, an authority which has become enthroned in the inmost essence of our being.
It is no mistake then to speak of God and to honor him as known through all being… But the way of knowing God that is most worthy of Him is to know Him through unknowing, in a union that rises above all intellect. The intellect is first detached from all beings, then it goes out of itself and is united to rays more luminous than light itself. Thanks to these rays it shines in the unfathomable depths of Wisdom. It is no less true, however, as I have said, that this Wisdom can be known from every reality.
The divine and conceptual scriptures are compared with dew, with water, with milk, with wine, and with honey, for they have the power like water to produce life, like milk to give growth, like vine to revive, like honey both to purify and preserve.
I pray thee, O God, that I may be beautiful within.
The right will produce more right and be its own reward — in the end a reward altogether infinite, for God will meet it with what is deeper than all right, namely, perfect love.
A kind of waking trance I have frequently had, quite up from boyhood, when I have been all alone. This has generally come upon me through repeating my own name two or three times to myself, silently, till all at once, as it were, out of the intensity of the consciousness of individuality, the individuality itself seemed to fade away into boundless being, and this not a confused state, but the clearest of the clearest, the surest of the surest, utterly beyond words, where death was almost a laughable impossibility, the loss of personality (if so it were) seeming no extinction but the only true life… I am ashamed of my feeble description. Have I not said that the state is beyond words?
Why then, you princes,
Do you with cheeks abash’d behold our works,
And call them shames? which are indeed nought else
But the protractive trials of great Jove,
To find persistive constancy in men.
