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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.
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.
It is natural for great minds — the true teachers of humanity — to care little about the constant company of others, just as little as the schoolmaster cares for joining in the frolic of the noisy crowd of boys which surrounds him. The mission of these great minds is to guide mankind over the sea of error to the harbor of truth, to draw men back from the dark abyss of barbarous crudeness into the light of culture and refinement.
Cease striving; then there will be self-transformation.
Whenever evil befalls us, we ought to ask ourselves, after the first suffering, how we can turn it into good. So shall we take occasion, from one bitter root, to raise perhaps many flowers.
You know not, wandering one, where you are flying to. You will run into an enemy while fleeing from an enemy.
If we will be quiet and ready enough, we shall find compensation in every disappointment.
Liberty in submission: what a problem! And yet that is what we must always come back to.
Every night we should call ourselves to account: “What weakness have I overcome today? What passions opposed? What temptations resisted? What virtue acquired?” Our weaknesses will decrease of themselves if they are brought every day to the light.
So, in regard to disagreeable and formidable things, prudence does not consist in evasion or flight, but in courage. He who wishes to walk in the most peaceful parts of life with any serenity must screw himself up to resolution. Let him front the object of his worst apprehension, and his stoutness will commonly make his fear groundless.
Thriftless ambition, that wilt ravin up
Thine own life’s means!
Be neither the slave of your impulses and sensations of the moment, nor of an abstract and general plan; be open to what life brings from within and without, and welcome the unforeseen, and give to your life unity, and bring the unforeseen within the lines of your plan. Let what is natural in you raise itself to the level of the spiritual, and let the spiritual become once more natural. Thus will your development be harmonious.
