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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.
You possess a real and permanent nature. It is within you, awaiting your development of it. This authentic nature has total power to banish worry, loneliness, confusion and all other pains. It is the right door to pleasant human relations at home and in your love life. It always knows what to do for you. So seek this true self — it also seeks you. It is like discovering a secret map to a lost treasure. New inner riches will be yours to keep and enjoy. Just find out who you really are. The rest is done for you.
The best way to come to truth being to examine things as really they are, and not to conclude they are, as we fancy of ourselves, or have been taught by others to imagine.
Ignorance is the parent of fear.
There is no greater mystery than this, that we keep seeking reality though in fact we are reality. We think that there is something hiding reality and that this must be destroyed before reality is gained. How ridiculous! A day will dawn when you will laugh at all your past efforts. That which will be the day you laugh is also here and now.
The best and most beautiful things cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart.
Philosophy is, to tell the truth, a homesickness, an effort to return to home.
That life is better life, past fearing death,
Than that which lives to fear.
When I see an anxious man, I say, “What does this man want?” If he did not want something which is not in his power, how could he be anxious? For this reason, a lute player when he is singing by himself has no anxiety, but when he goes to the theatre, he is anxious, even if he has a good voice and plays well on the lute, for he not only wishes to sing well, but also to obtain applause, which is not in his power.
What to ourselves in passion we propose,
The passion ending, doth the purpose lose.
The violence of either grief or joy
Their own enactures with themselves destroy:
Where joy most revels, grief doth most lament;
Grief joys, joy grieves, on slender accident.
Oh, the difficulty of fixing the attention of men on the world within them!
Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members… Self-reliance is its aversion.
Confine yourself to the present.
There is a moment of difficulty and danger at which flattery and falsehood can no longer deceive, and simplicity itself can no longer be misled.
All the efforts of the human mind cannot exhaust the essence of a single fly.
As to the thirst after knowledge, it is an old law that we all get whatever we want. None of us can get anything other than what we fix our hearts upon… The success sometimes may come immediately, but we must be ready to wait patiently even for what may look like an infinite length of time. The student who sets out with such a spirit of perseverance will surely find success and realization at last.
Of all knowledge the wise and good seek most to know themselves.
Seek here… “there” doesn’t exist.
Inasmuch as we neither seek nor shun any object except as our understanding represents it as either good or bad, all that is necessary to right action is right judgement… and the assurance of such an acquisition cannot fail to render us contented.
A little time alone in your own room will prove more valuable than anything else that could even be given to you.
As you start to walk on the way, the way appears.
Nothing does so establish the mind amidst the rollings and turbulence of present things, as a look above them and a look beyond them — above them, to the steady and good hand by which they are ruled, and beyond them, to the sweet and beautiful end to which, by that hand, they will be brought.
We are saved by hope, but hope that is seen is not hope, for who hopeth for that which he seeth?
Truth is too simple for us… we do not like those who unmask our illusions.
Merry and tragical! tedious and brief!
That is, hot ice and wondrous strange snow.
How shall we find the concord of this discord?
A mind that is truly free has reached the state in which opposites are seen as empty. This is the only freedom.
