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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.
Gradual practice makes him perfect, through a long series of slips, blunders, and fresh starts. It is just the same as in other things you learn.
It is good to love the unknown.
We are foolish to depend on the society of our fellow-men… they will not aid us… We should seek the truth without hesitation, and, if we refuse it, we show that we value the esteem of men more than the search for truth.
On every mountain height is rest.
Scholar: “Loving master, I can no more endure anything should divert me, how shall I find the nearest way to (the Divine)?”
Master: “Where the way is hardest there walk thou, and take up what the world rejecteth; and what the world doth, that do not thou. Walk contrary to the world in all things. And then thou comest the nearest way to it.”
To repel one’s cross is to make it heavier.
But by never coming to an end it seems to make some attempt at rivialing that which it can never fully realize in its being.
Man does not know in what rank to place himself. He has plainly gone astray and fallen from his true place, without being able to find it again. He seeks it anxiously and unsuccessfully, everywhere in impenetrable darkness.
To come to the pleasure you have not
You must go by a way in which you enjoy not.
To come to the knowledge you have not
You must go by a way in which you know not.
To come to the possession you have not
You must go by a way in which you possess not.
To come to be what you are not
You must go by a way in which you are not.
Glory be to God who has not given to his creatures any way to attain knowledge of Him except by means of their helplessness and hopelessness of ever reaching such attainment.
It is in your power, whenever you choose, to retire into yourself. Nowhere can you retire with more quietness or more freedom than within your own spirit… Constantly give yourself to this retreat and renew yourself. Let your principles be brief and fundamental, and when you have returned to them, that will be enough to purify the spirit completely, and to send you back from all discontent.
Study to be quiet.
Thou bear’st thy heavy riches but a journey,
And death unloads thee.
William Shakespeare (1564 – 1616)
Ceremony was but devised at first
To set a gloss on faint deeds, hollow welcomes,
Recanting goodness, sorry ere ’tis shown;
But where there is true friendship, there needs none.
A true-devoted pilgrim is not weary to measure kingdoms with his feeble steps.
It is proof of great talents to recall the mind from the senses, and to separate thought from habit.
Great works are performed not by strength, but by perseverance.
When we begin at the real beginning — when thought starts where alone it legitimately can start — it is forced onwards, from step to step, by an irresistible inward necessity, and cannot stop short till it has found its goal in the sphere of universal and absolute truth, or in that Infinite Mind which is at once the beginning and the end, the source and the final explanation of all thought and being.
Those whose minds are attracted to my invisible nature have a great labor to encounter, because an invisible path is difficult to be found by corporeal beings.
Do not despair or cast aside every good hope because your present state is quite unenviable. Rather, turn your thoughts to the blessings already granted you by God and to those reserved by promise for the future.
It is clear that the first step in the new birth is a reception of truths by the understanding, and the second is the will to act in accordance with truths, and finally to practice them. No one, however, can be said to be reformed by mere knowledge of truth; for man is able to acquire these and to talk about, teach, and preach them… But he is a reformed man who has affection for truth for the sake of truth.
The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.
Never disregard what your enemies say. They may be severe, they may be prejudiced, they may be determined to see only in one direction, but still in that direction they see clearly. They do not speak all the truth, but they generally speak the truth from one point of view; so far as that goes, attend to them.
There is at the surface infinite variety of things; at the center there is simplicity of cause.
It is no proof of a man’s understanding to be able to confirm whatever he pleases; but to be able to discern that what is true is true, and that what is false is false; this is the mark and character of intelligence.