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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.
Step out of your cave; the world waits for you as a garden.
We think this state (of uncertainty) is terrible. We are wrong. It is there that we find peace and liberty.
Blessed art thou therefore if that thou canst stand still from self-thinking and self-willing, and canst stop the wheel of they imagination and senses… forasmuch as hereby thou mayest arrive at length to see the great Salvation of God being made capable of all manner of Divine sensations and Heavenly communications. Since it is nought indeed but thine own hearing and willing that do hinder thee, so that thou dost not see and hear God.
Love sought is good, but given unsought is better.
The soul, when using the body as an instrument of perception — that is to say, when using the sense of sight and hearing, or some other sense — for the meaning of perceiving through the body is perceiving through the senses — is dragged by the body through the region of the changeable (the temporal), and wanders about and is confused. The world spins round her. She is like a drunkard when she touches change… But when, returning into herself she reflects, then she passes into the region of Eternity.
The only sure way to drop a problem is to never pick it up in the first place.
You traverse the world in search of happiness, which is within the reach of every man; a contented mind confers it on all.
Really, the fundamental, ultimate mystery — the only thing you need to know to understand the deepest metaphysical secrets — is this: that for every outside there is an inside and for every inside there is an outside, and although they are different, they go together.
As cold waters to a thirsty soul, so is good news from a far country.
Begin to search and dig in your own field for this pearl of eternity… and when you have found it you will know that all which you have sold or given away for it is as mere a nothing as a bubble upon the water.
Shake off this downy sleep, death’s counterfeit,
And look on death itself!
Only that day dawns to which we are awake.
The beast you ride is your various appetites,
change your wantings. When you prune
weak branches, the remaining fruit
get tastier. Lust can be redirected,
so that even when it takes you backward,
it goes toward shelter.
A strong intention can make “two oceans wide”
be the size of a blanket, or “seven hundred years”
the time it takes to walk to someone you love.
The highest good can only be beheld by those who are very pure in spirit, and can only be tasted when the passions are as they should be. This is why Saint Augustine prays: “O Lord, let me taste in my will what I know in my mind, and feel through love what I grasp through awareness.”
We are never without a pilot. When we know not how to steer, and dare not hoist a sail, we can drift. The current knows the way, though we do not. The ship of heaven guides itself, and will not accept a wooden rudder.
The thoughts that come often unsought, and, as it were, drop into the mind, are commonly the most valuable of any we have.
Lose no time, get up and take the course again, for he who rises quickly and continues his race makes it as if he had never fallen.
The opposites are thieves because what you build on one is undermined by the other. Or, to put it differently, joy leads to sorrow. But whatever is built in the centre cannot be taken from you.
The root of sanctity is sanity. A man must be healthy before he can be holy. We bathe first, and then perfume.
By faith it appears that in order to understand the meaning of life I must renounce my reason, the very thing for which alone a meaning is required.
A man would do well to carry a pencil in his pocket, and write down the thoughts of the moment. Those that come unsought for are commonly the most valuable, and should be retained.
It is not humility to insist on being someone that you are not. It is as much as saying that you know better than God who you are and who you ought to be. How do you expect to arrive at the end of your own journey if you take the road to another man’s city? How do you expect to reach your own perfection by leading somebody else’s life? His sanctity will never be yours. You must have the humility to work out your own salvation in a darkness where you are absolutely alone…
For pride, which is the inordinate attribution of goods and values and glories to one’s own contingent self, cannot exist where there is no contingent self to which anything can be attributed.
Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows.
If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is: infinite.
Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.