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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.
The union of the soul with soul and spirit with spirit in accordance with the sowing of the word brings growth to the seed sown and produces life. Everyone who is educated in obedience to his educator becomes a son.
Through zeal, knowledge is gained. Through lack of zeal, knowledge is lost. Let a man who knows this double path of gain and loss, thus place himself that knowledge may grow.
Be willing to be a beginner every single morning.
It is all the same to be living and dead, waking and sleeping, young and old, as each of these alternately change into the other.
Begin wholly afresh.
No one rises above who he or she has been without first having fallen down.
One day, with life and heart, is more than time enough to find a world.
A man often fancies that he guides himself, when he is actually guided by other people, and while his mind aims at one objective, his heart insensibly draws him towards another.
Everything lies in relationship, in how you relate yourself to things. You cannot change the thing itself but you can change your relationship to it.
Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.
There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance — that principle is contempt prior to investigation.
I have severed all ties because I seek deliverance. How is it possible for me to return to the world? He who seeks religious truth, which is the highest treasure of all, must leave behind all that can concern him or draw away his attention, and must be bent upon that one goal alone. He must free his soul from covetousness and lust, and also from the desire for power.
It is necessary to study the mind itself, mind studying mind. We know that there is the power of the mind called reflective. I am talking to you; at the same time I am standing aside, as it were, a second person, and knowing and hearing that I am talking. You work and think at the same time, another portion of your mind stands by and sees that you are talking. The powers of the mind should be concentrated and turned back upon itself, and as the darkest places reveal their secrets before the penetrating rays of the sun, so will this concentrated mind penetrate its own innermost secrets… It will all be revealed to us.
Settle yourself in solitude, and you will come upon Him in yourself.
The beginning of philosophy, at least for he who enters on it in the right way and by the door, is a consciousness of his own weakness and inability about necessary things.
Our greatest glory consists not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.
Suppose a neighbor should desire to light a candle at your fire, would it deprive your flame of light, because another profits by it?
Our life is like a journey in which, as we advance, the landscape takes a different view from that which is presented at first, and changes again, as we come nearer. This is just what happens, especially with our desires. We often find something else, no, something better than what we were looking for… Instead of finding, as we expected, pleasure, happiness, joy, we get experience, insight, knowledge — a real and permanent blessing, instead of a disappearing and illusory one. In their search for gold, the alchemists discovered other things — gunpowder, china, medicines, the laws of nature. There is a sense in which we are all alchemists.
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
The courage to change the things I can,
And wisdom to know the difference.
Places lie beyond these where we may live in peace, and be tempted to do no harm. We will take the road that promises to have that end, and we would not turn out of it, if it were a hundred times worse than our fears lead us to expect.
The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don’t go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really want.
Don’t go back to sleep.
The limit of your present understanding is not the limit of your possibilities.
Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win by fearing to attempt.
The beauty lies in realizing that you have a right not to be negative, and without that realization you cannot remember yourself. All Self-Remembering has to do with the fact that you came down to this earth, and life here does not correspond with what you came down from, and something in you knows it — that is, has not forgotten it, and that means remembers it.
There is guidance for each of us, and by lowly listening we shall hear the right word.