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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.
Always run in the short way, and the short way is the natural. Accordingly, say and do everything in conformity with the soundest reason. For such a purpose frees a man from trouble and warfare and all artificiality.
When it’s easier to do evil, but you choose to do good, you are a true hero.
A hundred thousand tongues may discourse to you about the sweetness of honey, but you can never have knowledge of it except by taste.
There is a remedy for every wrong and a satisfaction for every soul.
Saint Augustine cries, “Lord I cannot love you, but come in and love yourself in me.” According to Saint Paul, we must put off our own natural form and put on the form of God, and Saint Augustine tells us to discard our own mode of nature. Then the divine nature will flow in and be revealed. Saint Augustine says, “Those who seek and find, find not. He who seeks and finds not, he alone finds.” Saint Paul says, “What I was, was not I, it was God in me.”
The virtue which requires to be ever guarded is scarcely worth the sentinel.
Where there is plenty of light there is strong shadow.
I hold ambition of so airy and light a quality, that it is but a shadow’s shadow.
The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.
He who does not have attention in himself and does not regard his mind, cannot become pure in heart, and so cannot see God. He who does not have attention in himself cannot be poor in spirit, cannot be contrite, nor be gentle and meek, nor hunger and thirst after righteousness, nor be merciful, nor a peacemaker, nor suffer persecution for righteousness sake.
But ’tis strange:
And oftentimes, to win us to our harm,
The instruments of darkness tell us truths;
Win us with honest trifles, to betray’s
In deepest consequence.
“Has the road an end or not?” He answered: “The road has an end, but the stations have no end, for the journey is twofold, one to God and one in God.”
False spiritual work keeps you comfortable. Real spiritual work makes you uneasy.
The decrease of the general cause of suffering — illusion — is the only pleasant work which lies before a man, and gives him that true happiness in which his life consists.
Where there is much pretense, much has been borrowed — nature never pretends.
It was through the feeling of wonder that men now and at first began to philosophize.
Be dissatisfied with the life you are now leading, but when you have rejected it, do not be in despair over yourself… Learn what the wrestling teachers do. Has the boy fallen? “Rise,” they say, “and wrestle again until your strength is renewed.” That is how it should be with you. Realize that there is nothing more flexible than the human spirit. It needs but to will, and the thing is done; the spirit is set on the right path.
Fortune dreads the brave.
As the heart, so is the life. The within is ceaselessly becoming the without. Nothing remains unrevealed. That which is hidden is but for a time; it ripens and comes forth at last. Seed, tree, blossom, and fruit is the fourfold order of the universe. From the state of a man’s heart proceed the conditions of his life; his thoughts blossom into deeds, and his deeds bear the fruitage of character and destiny.
Carry religious principles into common life… Soon business, with all its cares and anxieties, the whole “unprofitable stir and fever of the world” will be to us a thing of the past.
The only sane thing to do with the world is to let it struggle with its own problems. You can do this only when seeing clearly that the world prefers to struggle painfully with its problems, never really wanting solutions.
We are tied to whatever we avoid.
I can live no longer by thinking.
Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you.
And if He closes before you the ways and passes all, He’ll show a hidden pathway which nobody has known.
