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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.
Who is there who can make muddy waters clear? But if allowed to remain still, it will gradually clear itself.
Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.
The One is ever present. Even in those moments when your natural mind (ego) shrouds you in deception and despair, The One is there urging you to light, to love and to Life.
Three brothers were in the habit of going to see the blessed Anthony every year. The first two would ask him questions about their thoughts and the salvation of the soul. But the third would keep silence without asking anything. Eventually Abba Anthony said to him, “You have been coming here to see me for a long time now and you never ask me any questions.” The other replied, “One thing is enough for me, Father… to see you.”
A quiet mind knows the answer, which means we must cease to fight anxiously for the answer.
As a man-of-war that sails through the sea, so this earth that sails through the air. We mortals are all on board a fast-sailing, never-sinking world-frigate, of which God was the ship-wright… Thus sailing with sealed orders, we ourselves are the repositories of the secret packet, whose mysterious contents we long to learn. There are no mysteries out of ourselves.
We shall not cease from exploration,
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started,
And to know that place for the first time.
It is wise to seek immortality for time defeats all other ambitions.
It is right for us to be exhorted so to love wisdom that we most eargerly seek it as our treasure, acquire more and more of it, suffer many trials, restrain desires, ponder the future, so that we may preserve innocence and beneficence. Whenever we act in this way we are in possession of true virtues, because our objective is true that is in harmony with our nature in reference to salvation and true happiness.
What is a man’s first duty? The answer brief: To be himself.
If we subject everything to reason, our religion will have nothing mysterious or supernatural. If we violate the principles of reason, our religion will be absurd and ridiculous.
The knowledge of God without that of man’s misery causes pride. The knowledge of man’s misery without that of God causes despair.
This is the greatest stumbling block in our spiritual discipline, which, in actuality, consists not in getting rid of the self but in realizing the fact that there is no such existence from the first. The realization means being “poor” in spirit. “Being poor” does not mean “becoming poor.” “Being poor” means to be from the very beginning not in possession of anything and not giving away what one has. Nothing to gain, nothing to lose; nothing to give, nothing to take; to be just so, and yet to be rich in inexhaustible possibilities — this is to be “poor” in its most proper and characteristic sense of the word, this is what all religious experiences tell us. To be absolutely nothing is to be everything. When one is in possession of something, that something will keep all other somethings from coming in.
We have in us the power to transcend the bounds of our narrow individuality, and to find ourselves in that which seems to lie beyond us.
Mental pleasures never clog; unlike those of the body, they are increased by repetition, approved of by reflection, and strengthened by enjoyment.
Whether we are in a pleasant or a painful state depends, finally, upon the kind of matter that pervades and engrosses our consciousness.
The true sovereign of the world, who moulds the world like soft wax, according to his pleasure, is he who lovingly sees into the world.
A happy life consists in a mind which is free, upright, undaunted and steadfast, beyond the influence of fear or desire.
It is not a man’s duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most enormous wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his support.
Philosophy is the art of living.
There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same. He that is once admitted to the right of reason is made a freeman of the whole estate. What Plato has thought, he may think; what a saint has felt, he may feel; what at any time has befallen any man, he can understand. Who hath access to this universal mind is a party to all that is or can be done, for this is the only and sovereign agent.
The right feeling is, “How strange this is! I never thought of that before, and yet I see it is true.”
Leave all things to take their natural course and do not interfere.
Come, let us go into the body of that light. Let us live in the cleanliness of that song. Let us throw off the pieces of the world like clothing and enter naked into wisdom. For this is what all hearts pray for when they cry, “Thy will be done.”
It is not necessary to go off on a tour of great cathedrals in order to find the Deity. Look within. You have to sit still to do it.
