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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.
The contemplation of Eternity maketh the Soul immortal.
When we first seek the truth, we think we are far from it. When we discover that the truth is already in us, we are all at once our original self. If we watch the shore from a boat, it seems that the shore is moving. But when we watch the boat directly, we know it is the boat that is moving. If we look at the world with a deluded body and mind, we will think that our self is permanent. But if we practice correctly and return to our true self, we will realize that nothing is permanent.
Our life is frittered away by detail… Simplify, simplify.
To understand things we must have been once in them and then have come out of them; so that first there must be captivity and then deliverance, illusion followed by disillusion, enthusiasm by disappointment. He who is still under the spell, and he who has never felt the spell, are equally incompetent. We only know well what we have first believed, then judged. To understand we must be free, yet not have been always free.
Wrong action in the past is corrected perfectly by right action in the present.
The tormenting feeling of hopelessness exists only in a person who still thinks he must be who he thinks he must be. The agony of hopelessness falls away from anyone who really sees he need not be anyone at all in the eyes of himself or the world. Then, hopelessness is replaced by living with complete power and peace — a new kind of power, a new kind of peace.
You are not a prophet, but go humbly on the way of the prophets, and you can arrive where they are. Don’t try to steer the boat. Don’t open a shop by yourself. Listen. Keep silent. You are not God’s mouthpiece. Try to be an ear, and if you do speak, ask for explanations.
All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms.
And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon’s mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper’d pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sounds. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans every thing.
What you are looking for is what is looking.
A very little key will open a very heavy door.
If we cannot find contentment in ourselves, it is useless to seek it elsewhere.
I was born when all I once feared, I could love.
Is freedom anything else than the power of living as we choose? Nothing else. Tell me then, you men, do you wish to live in error? We do not. No one who lives in error is free. Do you with to live in fear? Do you wish to live in sorrow? Do you wish to live in tension? By no means. No one who is in a state of fear or sorrow or tension is free, but whoever is delivered from sorrows or fears or anxieties, he is at the same time also delivered from servitude.
How can any external revelation help me unless it is verified by internal experience?
There is no path to truth. Truth must be discovered, but there is no formula for its discovery. What is formulated is not true. You must set out on the uncharted sea, and the uncharted sea is yourself. You must set out to discover yourself, but not according to any plan or pattern, for then there is no discovery.
The more we do, the more we can do; the more busy we are, the more leisure we have.
The courage of truth is the first qualification for philosophic studies.
Do not await the fulfillment of the divine cause you serve, but know that none of your efforts are fruitless, for they all advance the cause.
Though one should live through all the time from Adam and all the time to come before the judgment day doing good works, yet he who, energizing in his highest, purest part, crosses from time to eternity, verily in the sight of God this man conceives and does far more than anyone who lives throughout all past and future time, because this now includes the whole of time. One master says that in crossing over time into the now each power of the soul will surpass itself.
I laugh when I hear that the fish in the water are thirsty. You don’t grasp the fact that what is most alive of all is inside your own house, and so you walk from one holy city to the next with a confused look!
Nothing has such power to broaden the mind as the ability to investigate systematically and truly all that comes under your observation in life.
Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.
How our delight in any particular study, art, or science rises and improves in proportion to the application which we bestow upon it. Thus, what was at first an exercise becomes at length an entertainment.
The essence of religion consists solely in the answer to the question, “Why do I live, and what is my relation to the infinite universe around me?”
Do not be bewildered by the surfaces; in the depths all becomes law.
