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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 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.
By prayer I mean not that which is only in the mouth, but that which springs up from the bottom of the heart. In fact, just as trees with deep roots are not shattered or uprooted by storms… in the same way prayers that come from the bottom of the heart, having their roots there, rise to heaven with complete assurance and are not knocked off course by the assault of any thought. That is why the Psalm says, “Out of the deep have I called unto Thee, O Lord.”
But often in the world’s most crowded streets, but often, in the din of strife, there rises an unspeakable desire after the knowledge of our buried life, a thirst to spend our fire and restless force in tracking out our true, original course; a longing to inquire into the mystery of this heart that beats so wild, so deep in us, to know whence our thoughts come and where they go.
To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.
Fortune brings in some boats that are not steered.
Awakening begins when a man realizes that he is going nowhere and does not know where to go.
What need a man forestall his date of grief and run to meet what he would most avoid.
Diogenes was free. How so? Not because he was of free parentage, for that was not the case, but because he was himself a free man. He had cast aside every handle by which he might be enslaved… All things sat loosely upon him, all things were attached by slender ties.
No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.
The strongest principle of growth lies in human choice.
There is no darkness but ignorance.
I knew not the light, and I thought there was no sure truth in life; but when I perceived that only light enables men to live, I sought to find the sources of the light… And when I reached this source of light I was dazzled with the splendour, and I found there full answers to my questions as to the purpose of the lives of myself and others.
The mind should be kept independent of any thoughts that arise within it. If the mind depends on anything, it has no sure haven.
I imagined that unity of being could be reached within the customary state of consciousness. I believed, in other words, that a radical change of being could take place as one was, merely through some adjustments. This is probably what most of us think, for we do not realize that in order to change anything in ourselves everything else must change, lest by trying to change one thing we create wrong results in other directions. Change of being is not a patchwork process. All sorts of minor modifications are no doubt possible in people without necessarily harmful results.
The external, restless, useless activity which consists in establishing and adapting the external forms resulting from the change of consciousness, hides from men that essential, inner activity which alone can ameliorate their lives. And this superstition, more than anything else, hinders the general amelioration of human life.
Power rests in tranquillity.
