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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.
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.
We, ignorant of ourselves, beg often our own harms, which the wise powers deny us for our own good; so find we profit by losing of our prayers.
To realize that you have not got something and that you need it, this is real asking.
For never any thing can be amiss,
When simpleness and duty tender it.
If you persist in trying to attain what is never attained (It is Tao’s Gift!), if you persist in making effort to obtain what effort cannot get, if you persist in reasoning about what cannot be understood, you will be destroyed by the very thing you seek. To know when to stop, to know when you can get no further by your own action, this is the right beginning!
If there are phenomena, the reality of which we cannot deny but which cannot be fitted into our accepted conceptual framework, then something is wrong with that framework and we must look for another.
The new birth, as signifying only a change of moral behaviour, is not only thus false and absurd in itself, but is also exceedingly prejudicial to true conversion, and saps the foundation of our redemption.
A man should orient his will and all his works to God and having only God in view go forward unafraid, not thinking, “Am I right or am I wrong?” One who worked out all the chances before starting his first fight would never fight at all. And if, going to someplace, we must think how to set the front foot down, we shall never get there. It is our duty to do the next thing: go straight on, that is the right way.
He bids fair to grow wise, who has discovered that he is not so.
The first task is clearing of the understanding, thereto adding a supernatural light, by which natural reason comes to see something that it saw not before, or at least did not esteem before.
If three people meet and one of them is keeping inner peace, the second is giving thanks to God in sickness, the third is serving others from an unselfish motive, those three are performing the same work.
The greatness and the wretchedness of men are so evident that the true religion must necessarily teach us both that there is in man some great source of greatness, and a great source of wretchedness. It must then give us an explanation of these astonishing contradictions. In order to make man happy, it must prove to him that there is a God, and we ought to love Him, that our true happiness is to be in Him, and our sole evil to be separated from Him.
No act is aloof. Your most secret deed is invisibly reported, its good being protected in joy, its evil destroyed in pain.
The sufferings of the whole of humanity, and of individuals, are not useless, but lead humanity, though indirectly, ever to the one activity appointed for men: that of perfecting themselves.
To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only aim of life.
It is necessary to study the mind itself, mind studying mind. We know that there is the power of the mind called reflective. I am talking to you… at the same time I am standing aside, as it were, a second person, and knowing and hearing that I am talking. You work and think at the same time, another portion of your mind stands by and sees that you are talking. The powers of the mind should be concentrated and turned back upon itself, and as the darkest places reveal their secrets before the penetrating rays of the sun, so will this concentrated mind penetrate its own innermost secrets… it will all be revealed to us.
