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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.
Human history is the long terrible story of a man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.
A man who desires to excel should work with those things that are in themselves most excellent.
Attention alone — that attention which is so full that the ‘I’ disappears — is required of me. I have to deprive all that I call ‘I’ of the light of my attention and turn it on to that which cannot be conceived.
When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy. When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.
To know goodness is not sufficient to reach blessedness if one does not put goodness into practice with works. Piety towards God is actually the beginning of knowledge.
We must approach this matter in an entirely different manner. It is great and mystical; it is no common thing, nor is it given to every man. Wisdom alone is not enough; a man needs a certain degree of readiness.
I do believe you think what now you speak;
But what we do determine oft we break.
Purpose is but the slave to memory.
No tongue can tell Your secret
For the measure of the word obscures Your nature
But the gift of the ear
Is that it hears
What the tongue cannot tell.
Don’t grieve for what doesn’t come.
Some things that don’t happen
Keep disasters from happening.
God is not attained by a process of addition to anything in the soul, but by a process of subtraction.
Men have but to understand this: they must cease to care for material and external matters… let them apply one hundredth part of the energy now used by them in outward concerns to those in which they are free — to the recognition and profession of the truth that confronts them, to the deliverance of themselves and others form the falsehoods which conceal the truth. Then the false system of life which now torments us, which threatens us with still greater suffering, will be destroyed at once without struggle, then the Kingdom of Heaven, at least in that first stage… will be established.
All things change, yet we need not fear anything new.
When reality is perceived in its nature of ultimate perfection, the practitioner has reached a level of wisdom called non-discrimination mind, a wondrous communion in which there is no longer any distinction made between subject and object.
Every day in many ways, day after day, we walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-law. But always meeting ourselves.
“Don’t look for God,” the Master said. “Just look, and all will be revealed.”
“But how is one to look?”
“Each time you look at anything, see only what is there and nothing else.”
The disciples were bewildered, so the Master made it simpler: “For instance: when you look at the moon, see the moon and nothing else.”
“What else could one see except the moon when one looks at the moon?”
“A hungry person could see a ball of cheese. A lover, the face of his beloved.”
Many go out for wool, and come home shorn themselves.
Learn to distinguish between Self and Truth. Self is the cause of selfishness and the source of evil; Truth cleaves to no self; it is universal and leads to justice and righteousness.
To know means to know all. Not to know all means not to know. In order to know all, it is only necessary to know a little. But in order to know this little, it is first necessary to know pretty much.
What I will is fate.
When you travel to the Celestial City, carry no letters of introduction. When you knock, ask to see God, none of the servants.
Where belief is painful, we are slow to believe.
The fulfillment of Christ’s teaching consists in moving away from self toward God.
Oft expectation fails, and most oft there
Where most it promises, and oft it hits
Where hope is coldest and despair most fits.
Be ahead of all parting, as though it were already behind you, like the winter that hast gone by. For among those winters there is one so endlessly winter that only by wintering through it will your heart survive.
Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control: these three alone lead life to sovereign power.
