Browse by: Quotation Source | Entire Living Book | The Seeker | The Search
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.
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.
Finally the soul, which has travelled by these ways towards the things that are above and has abandoned everything that is accessible to human nature, penetrates into the sanctuary of the knowledge of God that is wrapped on all sides in darkness. There, as everything perceptible and intelligible has been left outside, there remains for the soul’s contemplation only what cannot be grasped by the intellect. It is there that God dwells according to the words of Scripture: “Moses drew near to the thick darkness.”
Man’s life begins only with the appearance of rational consciousness.
Love and resentment can never occupy the same space at the same time.
Silence is a solvent that destroys personality, and gives us leave to be great and universal.
Nature brings us back to absolute truth whenever we wander.
I go before thee to make the crooked places straight.
As physicians always have their instruments ready for cases which suddenly require their skill, so do you have principles ready for insight into both divine and human affairs, and for doing everything, even the smallest, with an awareness of the bond which unites the divine and the human. For you will not do anything well which pertains to man without also doing well in the divine, and vice versa.
Silence is a source of Great Strength.
The most certain sign of wisdom is continual cheerfulness; her state is like that of things in the regions above the moon, always clear and serene.