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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.
He who builds upon another man’s ground, loses his mortar and stone.
I prefer those men of genius who awaken in me the sense of truth, and who increase the sum of one’s inner liberty.
So may the outward shows be least themselves:
The world is still deceived with ornament.
In law, what plea so tainted and corrupt,
But, being seasoned with a gracious voice,
Obscures the show of evil?
The longest journey is the journey inward.
The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right.
When we have reached love, we have reached God and our journey is at an end.
It matters little where a man may be at this moment… the point is whether he is growing.
Surely it is the maxim of loving-kindness: Do not do unto others what you would not have done unto you.
Observe how much more pain is brought on by your anger and frustrations over other’s actions, than by the actions themselves.
We often try to banish the gloom and despondency of the present by speculating upon our chances of success in the future; a process which leads us to invent a great many unreal hopes. Every one of them contains the seed of illusion, and disappointment is inevitable when our hopes are shattered.
We loosely talk of self-realization, for lack of a better term. But how can one realize or make real that which alone is real? All we need to do is to give up our habit of regarding as real that which is unreal. All religious practices are meant solely to help us do this. When we stop regarding the unreal as real, then reality alone will remain, and we will be that.
Being fully present is the best guarantee for a bright future.
However much we have dulled ourselves with hypocrisy, and dulled ourselves with the self-suggestion resulting from hypocrisy, nothing can destroy the absolute certainty of that simple and clear truth that no exterior effort can provide us with security.
Solitude is the furnace of transformation. Without solitude we remain victims of our society and continue to be entangled in the illusions of the false self.
The highest purpose of intellectual cultivation is to give a man a perfect knowledge and command of his own inner self; to render his consciousness its own light.
From this difference between the new and the old man, which is a difference as real as that between heaven and earth, several lessons of great instruction may be learned.
Perhaps, for many of us, all experience merely defines, so to speak, the shape of that gap where our love of God ought to be. It is not enough. It is something. If we cannot “practice the presence of God,” it is something to practice the absence of God, to become increasingly aware of our unawareness.
Errors, like straws, upon the surface flow; he who would search for pearls must dive below.
The animal existence of a man does not constitute human life alone. Life, according to the will of God only, is also not human life. Human life is a combination of the animal life and the divine life. And the more this combination approaches to the divine life, the more life there is in it.
One ought every day at least to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.
My unassisted heart is barren clay,
That of its native self can nothing feed.
Of Good and pious works Thou art the seed,
That quickens only where Thou sayest it may.
Unless Thou show to us Thine own true way,
No man can find it.
Father! Thou must lead.
Once we accept our limits, we go beyond them.
In society as it is now constituted, all the established rules have so many mechanical duties, while real duty consists in obeying the laws of our own being.
Press on! A better fate awaits you.
Every nature is contented with itself when it goes on its way well, and a rational nature goes on its way well, when in its thoughts it consents to nothing false… and when it is satisfied with everything that is assigned to it by the common nature.
