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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.
Do not require a description of the countries towards which you sail. The description does not describe them to you, and tomorrow you will arrive there and know them by inhabiting them.
Death is not an event in life… we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in the way in which our visual field has no limits.
The true critic strives for a clear vision of things as they are… his effort is to get free from himself, so that he may in no way distort that which he wishes to understand or reproduce. His superiority to the common herd lies in this effort… He distrusts his own senses, he sifts his own impressions, by returning upon them from different sides and at different times, by comparing, moderating, shading, distinguishing, and so endeavouring to approach more and more nearly to the formula which represents the maximum of truth.
Let us once lose our oaths to find ourselves,
Or else we lose ourselves to keep our oaths.
A happy life is joy in the truth.
Ye cannot know eternal reality by a definition.
Money is not required to buy one necessity of the soul.
Our patience will achieve more than our force.
Consciousness of error is, to a certain extent, a consciousness of understanding, and correction of error is the plainest proof of energy and mastery.
Make not a close friend of a melancholy, sad person. He will be sure to increase your adversity and decrease your good fortune. He goes always heavily loaded, and you must bear half.
Do what you should do when you should do it. Refuse to do what you should not do. And when it is not clear, wait until you are sure.
A cucumber is bitter? Throw it away. There are briars in the road? Turn aside from them. This is enough. Do not add, “Why were such things made in the world?”
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting.
The soul that rises with us, our life’s star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting.
And cometh from afar;
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home.
Our salvation consists wholly in being saved from ourselves.
By neglecting self-interest we achieve self-interest.
Even so
Doth valour’s show and valour’s worth divide
In storms of fortune.
The world is imprisoned by its own activity.
Only let your present and past distress make you feel and acknowledge this twofold great truth: first, that in and of yourself, you are nothing but darkness, vanity, and misery; secondly, that of yourself, you can no more help yourself to light and comfort, than you can create an angel. People at all times can seem to assent to these two truths, but then it is an assent which has no depth or reality, and so is of little or no use, but your condition has opened your heart for a deep and full conviction of these truths. Now give way, I beseech you, to this conviction, and hold these two truths, in the same degree of certainty as you know two and two to be four, and then you are with the prodigal come to yourself, and above half your work is done.
If you understand, you can make use of it on the road, like a dragon reaching the water, like a tiger in the mountains. If you don’t understand, then the worldly truth will prevail, and you will be like a ram caught in a fence, like a fool watching over a stump waiting for a rabbit.
It is only when everything, even love fails that with a flash, man finds out how vain, how dream-like is this world. Then he catches a glimpse of the beyond. It is only by giving up this world that the other comes, never through holding on to this one.
Nothing
in the world
is usual today.
This is
the first morning.
Come quickly — as soon as
these blossoms open,
they fall.
This world exists
as a sheen of dew on flowers.
For when your spirit within yourself is able to penetrate inward through and beyond your own flesh and life, and is able to catch hold of the innermost moving of God, then you are clearly in Heaven.
To be upset at anything which happens to us is a separation of ourselves from nature.
The more we know, the greater our thirst for knowledge. The water-lily, in the midst of waters, opens its leaves and expands its petals at the first pattering of showers, and rejoices in the raindrops with a quicker sympathy than the parched shrub in the sandy desert.
Abba Lot came one day to see Abba Joseph and said to him, “Father, I keep my little rule to the best of my ability. I observe my modest fast and my contemplative silence. I say my prayers and do my meditation. I endeavour as far as I can to drive useless thoughts out of my heart. What more can I do?”
The elder rose to answer and lifted his hands to heaven. His fingers looked like lighted candles and he said, “Why not become wholly fire?”
