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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.
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.
God never makes us sensible of our weaknesses, except to give us of his strength.
All we have to do is to receive what we are given.
The man who lives in the true light and true love has the finest, noblest, and most worthwhile life that ever was or will be, therefore, it cannot but be loved and treasured above any other life.
All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it — tantalising glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if should really become manifest — if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself — you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say, “Here at last is the thing I was made for.” We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose all.
All day long a little burro labors, sometimes with heavy loads on her back and sometimes just with worries about things that bother only burros. And worries, as we know, can be more exhausting than physical labor. Once in a while a kind monk comes to her stable and brings a pear, but more than that, he looks into the burro’s eyes and touches her ears and for a few seconds the burro is free and even seems to laugh, because love does that. Love frees.
The soul’s communication of truth is the highest event in nature… and this communication is an influx of the Divine Mind into our mind… Every moment when the individual feels invaded by it is memorable.
Happiness is no other than soundness and perfection of the mind.
An idea about God is not God.
Truth comes home to the mind so naturally that when we learn it for the first time, it seems as though we do no more than recall it to our memory.
Love is infallible; it has no errors, for all errors are the want of love.
Do they cast us out of the city? They cannot cast us out of that which is in the heavens. If they who hate us could do this, they would be doing something real against us. So long, however, as they cannot do this, they are but pelting us with drops of water or striking us with the wind.