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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.
That man by retiring from all externals and withdrawing into himself in the centre of his own unity becometh most like unto God.
That which causes us to think is dear to us, and everything which gives even a small impulse to our faculties is agreeable.
If you want what visible reality can give, you’re an employee.
If you want the unseen world, you’re not living your truth.
Both wishes are foolish, but you’ll be forgiven for forgetting
that what you really want is love’s confusing joy.
The eye by which I see God is the same as the eye by which God sees me. My eye and God’s eye are one and the same.
Before we passionately desire anything which another enjoys, we should examine into the happiness of its possessor.
Everything which compromises the future or destroys my inner liberty, which enslaves me to things or obliges me to be other than I could and ought to be… hurts me.
But to come to the land of love, you must pass through the pains of death, for to love persons means to die to the need for persons, and to be utterly alone.
Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past.
There comes a time when, on the one hand, a vague awakening consciousness stirs the soul, the consciousness of the higher law… and the sufferings a man endures from the contradictions of life, compel him to renounce the social order and to adopt the new… And this time has now arrived.
O, what authority and show of truth
Can cunning sin cover itself withal!
Those that make you return, for whatever reason,
to God’s solitude, be grateful to them.
Worry about the others, who give you
delicious comforts that keep you from prayer.
Friends are enemies sometimes,
and enemies friends.
Be absolute with death. Either death or life
Shall thereby be the sweeter. Reason thus with life:
If I do lose thee, I do lose a thing
That none but fools would keep.
Modest doubt is call’d the beacon of the wise.
Life is a dream. Death is an awakening.
There are three things which are real. God, human folly, and laughter. Since the first two pass our comprehension, we must do what we can with the third.
And this is a miracle: the moment that you realize that there is no way to make a home, then this whole existence is home. Then wherever you are, you are at home.
Really great minds seem to have… dissipated the clouds which concealed the heaven from our view, and they thus disclose to themselves and to us a clear and blissful world of everlasting repose.
The disciples said to him, “Tell us what our end will be.” Jesus said, “If you haven’t found the beginning, why ask about the end? For where the beginning is, the end is also. Blessed are those who stand at the beginning, for they will know the end, and they will not taste death.”
Circumstances are things round about; we are in them, not under them.
The first lesson, then, is to sit for some time and let the mind run on. The mind is bubbling up all the time. It is like that monkey jumping about. Let the monkey jump as much as he can; you simply watch and wait. Knowledge is power says the proverb, and that is true. Until you know what the mind is doing you cannot control it. Give it the full length of the reins; many most hideous thoughts may come into it; you will be astonished that it was possible for you to think such thoughts. But you will find that each day the mind’s vagaries are becoming less and less violent, that each day it is becoming calmer… until at last it will be under perfect control, but we must patiently practise every day.
The entire secret of real happiness is contained in the following truth: I am not my memories about myself.
All the doors that lead inward to the secret place of the most high are doors outward: out of self — out of smallness — out of wrong.
There is an immense ocean over which the mind can sail, upon which the vessel of thought has not yet been launched… Let us haul it over the belt of land, launch on the ocean, and sail outwards. There is much beyond all that has ever yet been imagined.
The only way to get the confidence of the world is to show the world that you do not want their confidence.
It takes a wise man to discover a wise man.