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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 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.
There is an endless Kingdom to be inhabited.
Those who have the gale of the Holy Spirit go forward even in sleep.
The hidden well-spring of your soul must needs rise and run murmuring to the sea; And the treasure of your infinite depths would be revealed to your eyes. But let there be no scales to weigh your unknown treasure; And seek not the depths of your knowledge with staff or sounding line. For self is a sea boundless and measureless.
The truest sayings are paradoxical.
The bamboo shadows
Sweep the steps
But raise no dust.
Never speak out of anger,
Never act out of fear,
Never choose from impatience,
But wait… and peace will appear.
Nature never says one thing and wisdom another.
Come hither, eat your bread with joy, that is the mystical bread.
The telling question of a person’s life is whether or not he is related to the Infinite.
Fall in love with Wisdom and she will keep you… put her around you, and she will exalt you… honor her that she may embrace you… For what can anyone find shameful in the love of Wisdom or in the person who professes himself a “lover” of wisdom?
The ruling faculty does not disturb itself, I mean, it does not frighten itself or cause itself pain… The guiding principle in itself wants nothing, unless it makes a want for itself, and therefore it is free.
Beauty doth varnish age, as if new-born,
And gives the crutch the cradle’s infancy:
O, ’tis the sun that maketh all things shine.
If nothing that can be seen can either be God or represent Him to us as He is, then to find God we must pass beyond everything that can be seen and enter into darkness. Since nothing that can be heard is God, to find Him we must enter into silence. Since God cannot be imagined, anything our imagination tells us about Him is ultimately a lie and therefore we cannot know Him as He really is unless we pass beyond everything that can be imagined and enter into an obscurity without images and without the likeness of any created thing.
When the ripe moment comes, the truth within answers to the fact without, as the flower responds to the sun, giving it heat and color.
By humility, out of an enemy He has made a friend, which is more than to have created a new earth.
The subject on which I meditate is truth. The practice to which I devote myself is truth. The topic of my conversation is truth. My thoughts are always in the truth. For lo! My self has become the truth.
The idea of God is the idea of our own spiritual natures enlarged to infinity.
There are wonders in true affection.
Prove all things; hold fast that which is good.
Great peace have they which love Thy law; and nothing shall offend them.
That light we see is burning in my hall.
How far that little candle throws his beams!
So shines a good deed in a naughty world.
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.
There are not different truths in the world, for truth is one and the same at all times and in every place.
The partial becomes whole, the crooked becomes straight, the empty becomes full, the worn out becomes new.