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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 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.
The world is like a sheet of paper on which something is typed. The reading and the meaning will vary with the reader, but the paper is the common factor, always present, rarely perceived. When the ribbon is removed, typing leaves no trace on the paper. So is my mind — the impressions keep on coming, but no trace is left.
Honest plain words best pierce the ear of grief.
I love everything, and dislike one thing only: the desperate imprisonment of my being… Liberty for the inner man is then the strongest of my passions — perhaps my only passion.
I made four mistakes in my preliminary steps in this way: I thought that I remember Him, that I know Him, that I love Him and that I seek Him. But when I reached Him, I saw that His remembering of me preceded my remembrance of Him, that His knowledge about me preceded my knowledge of Him, that His love towards me was more ancient than my love towards Him, and that He sought me in order that I would begin to seek Him.
Don’t waste the works of the devil. Spiritual roots can grow deeper in adversity. Use the inner, raging storms. Have sight without flight or fight. Remain a seer. Nothing is too much. All storms are for growth. Remember, no exceptions!
Those who have resources within themselves, who can dare to live alone, want friends the least, but, at the same time, best know how to prize them the most. But no company is far preferable to bad, because we are more apt to catch the vices of others than their virtues.
If you wish to grow in your spiritual life, you must not allow yourself to be caught up in the workings of the world. You must find time alone, away from the noise and confusion, away from the allure of power and wealth.
That which we acquire with the most difficulty we retain the longest; as those who have earned a fortune are usually more careful of it than those who have inherited one.
All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.
Speech is mightier than all fighting.
