Browse by: Quotation Source | Entire Living Book | The Seeker | The Sacred
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.
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.
One is never afraid of the unknown; one is afraid of the known coming to an end.
From a distance it is something; nearby it is nothing.
It is love that asks, that seeks, that knocks, that finds, and that is faithful to what it finds.
To a mind that is still, the whole universe surrenders.
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope. For hope would be hope for the wrong thing.
Since I’ve learned to be silent, everything has come so much closer to me.
God never ceases to speak to us, but the noise of the world without, and the tumult of our passions within, bewilder us, and prevent us from listening. All must be silent around us, and all must be still within us, when we would listen with our whole souls to this voice. It is a still, small voice, and is only heard by those who listen to no other. Alas! How seldom is it that the soul is so still that it can hear when God speaks to it!
The wish to untie, through understanding of their true nature, the chains of selfishness and sensuality — this is the yearning for freedom.