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Share in the accounts and discoveries of the many individuals who, just like you, set out to find new, true answers that could stand up to the test of passing time with its ever-changing conditions. Welcome these inward and uplifting thoughts as if they were your own, for in one sense… they are.
Adversity draws men together and produces beauty and harmony in life’s relationships, just as the cold of winter produces ice-flowers on the window-panes, which vanish with the warmth.
If by patience, if by watching, I can secure one new ray of light, can feel myself elevated… shall I not watch ever?
It would be a grave error to suppose that Buddhism and Christianity merely offer various explanations of suffering, or worse, justifications and mystifications built on this ineluctable fact. On the contrary both show that suffering remains inexplicable most of all for the man who attempts to explain it in order to evade it, or who thinks explanation itself is an escape. Suffering is not a “problem” as if it were something we could stand outside and control. Suffering as both Christianity and Buddhism see it, each in its own way, is part of our very ego-identity and empirical existence, and the only thing to do about it is to plunge right into the middle of contradiction and confusion in order to be transformed by what Zen calls the “Great Death” and Christianity calls “dying and rising with Christ.”
Once upon a time there was a Greek philosopher who told one of his disciples to give money to anyone who insulted him, for three years. At the end of this period of testing the master said to him, “Now you may go to Athens to learn wisdom.” Entering Athens the disciple met a wise man who was sitting by the city gate insulting all the passers-by. He did the same to the disciple who immediately burst out laughing. “Why do you laugh when I insult you?” demanded the wise man. “Because for three years I have been giving money to those who insulted me, and now you are doing it for nothing.” “Come into the city. It belongs to you,” replied the wise man. Abba John, who was in the habit of recounting this story would add: “That is the gateway to God.”
Now or Never! You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment.
There is no death… Only a change of worlds.
A sublime soul can rise to all kinds of greatness, but by his own effort; it can tear itself loose from all bondage, to all that limits and restrains it, but only by the strength of determination.
Self-government is indeed, the noblest rule on earth… The object of a loftier ambition than the possession of crowns or sceptres. The truest conquest is where the soul is bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ. The monarch of his own mind is the only real potentate.
A man should never be ashamed to own he has been in the wrong, which is but saying, in other words, that he is wiser today than he was yesterday.
The characteristic of heroism is its persistency. All men have wandering impulses, fits and starts… But when you have chosen your part, abide by it, and do not weakly try to reconcile yourself with the world. The heroic cannot be the common, nor the common the heroic.
For this is the journey that men make: to find themselves. It doesn’t matter what else they find: fame, fortune, many loves, revenge… when the tickets are collected at the end of the ride, they are tossed in the bin marked failure.
But if a man happens to find himself, the extent of his courage, the limit of his dedication, the position in life from which he can no longer retreat, he has found a mansion he can inhabit with dignity all the days of his life.
No need to wait until we die! There’s more to want here than money and being famous and bites of roasted meat.
People, generally, are not aware of the ease of mind there is in knowing where they are, and where they are going. The sensation of being lost is a keen distress.
The sage attends to the inner, and not to the outer.
That many do not advance in the Christian progress because they stick in penances and particular exercises, while they neglect the Love of God, which is the end.
I have tried to make friends by corporeal gifts, but have only made enemies. I never made friends but by spiritual gifts.
When you know that you are eternal you can play your true role in time. When you know you are divine you can become completely human. When you know you are one with God you are free to become absolutely yourself, individual and holy and my child.
If thou remember’st not the slightest folly
That ever love did make thee run into,
Thou hast not loved.
The best time — in fact, the only time — to make a real change in your life is in the moment of seeing the need for it. He who hesitates always gets lost in the hundred reasons why tomorrow is a better day to get started!
For most people, even for educated and thinking people, the chief obstacle in the way of acquiring self-consciousness consists in the fact that they think they possess it, that is that they already possess self-consciousness and everything connected with it; individuality in the sense of a permanent and unchangeable ‘I,’ will, ability to do, and so on. It is evident that a man will not be interested if you tell him that he can acquire by long and difficult work something which, in his opinion, he already has. On the contrary he will think either that you are mad or that you want to deceive him with a view to personal gain.
No single event can awaken within us a stranger totally unknown to us. To live is to be slowly born. It would be a bit too easy if we could go about borrowing ready-made souls. It is true that a sudden illumination may now and then light up a destiny and impel a man in a new direction. But illumination is vision, suddenly granted the spirit, at the end of a long and gradual preparation. Bit by bit I learnt my grammar. I was taught my syntax. My sentiments were awakened. And now suddenly a poem strikes me in the heart.
If you come to a place of total helplessness, total powerlessness, don’t resist. You might find something that up until then you have been missing.
As high as we have mounted in delight, in our dejection do we sink as low.
The roaring of lions, the howling of wolves, the raging of the stormy sea, and the destructive sword, are portions of eternity too great for the eye of man.
The man who is just and resolute will not be moved from his settled purpose, either by the misdirected rage of his fellow citizens, or by the threats of an imperious tyrant.
