Browse by: Quotation Source | Entire Living Book | The Search | The Sacred
Here you will read the innermost thoughts and feelings of inspired seekers who have gone before you. Some names you may know… others you will be glad to meet!
Discovering this the mind becomes whole: the split between I and me, man and the world, the ideal and the real, comes to an end. Paranoia, the mind beside itself, becomes metanoia, the mind with itself and so free from itself.
Many think that dying to themselves is what causes them so much pain. But it is actually the part of them that still lives that causes the problem. Death is only painful to you when you resist it. Your imagination exaggerates how bad death will be. Self-love fights with all of its strength to live. Die inwardly as well as outwardly. Let all that is not born of God within you die.
We feel that we are greater than we know.
The spiritual life justifies itself to those who live it, but what can we say to those who do not understand? This, at least, we can say: that it is a life whose experiences are proved real to their possessor, because they remain with him when brought closest into contact with the objective realities of life. Dreams cannot stand this test. We wake from them to find that they are but dreams. Wanderings of an overwrought brain do not stand this test. These highest experiences that I have had of God’s presence have been rare and brief — flashes of consciousness which have compelled me to exclaim with surprise, “God is here!”
William James (1842 – 1910), from The Varieties of Religious Experience, attributed to J. Trevor
Learning is but an adjunct to ourself,
And where we are our learning likewise is.
There is no king who has not had a slave among his ancestors, and no slave who has not had a king among his.
Take the case of a large number of people who have gathered together for the purpose of carrying out some practical project. If there are two rascals among them, they will recognize each other quickly, as if each wore a similar badge, and they will at once conspire for some selfishness or treachery… It is really curious to see how two such men, especially if they are morally and intellectually inferior, will recognize each other at first sight, with what zeal they will try to become friends, how affably and cheerfully they will rush to greet each other.
I am by Nature made for my own good, not for my own evil.
The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens.
The heart of man is made to reconcile the most glaring contradictions.
Dear to us are those who love us, but dearer are those who reject us as unworthy, for they add another life, they build a heaven before us whereof we had not dreamed, and thereby supply to us new powers out of the recesses of the spirit, and urge us to new and unattempted performances.
For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation.
No bird soars too high, if he soars with his own wings.
The moral enthusiast, who in the maze of his subtleties, loses or despises the plain paths of honesty and duty, is on the brink of crimes.
You have to make your own world, instead of succumbing to the one that presses on you. You have to turn the tables on what appears to be fate or the full weight of society. Against the greatest odds, you have to keep your wits about you and refuse to surrender to anyone or anything less than divine. You have to be faithful to the mystery taking place in your heart, rather than to any idea or system that would try, with the best of motives, to disempower you and make you theirs.
The precept, “Know yourself” was not solely intended to abolish the pride of men, but also that we might understand our own value.
I am a little pencil in the hand of a writing God who is sending a love letter to the world.
Talkative people listen to no one, for they are ever speaking. And the first evil surrounding those who do not know the meaning of silence is that they hear nothing.
If we do depend on others psychologically, we become secondhand people; which we are. The whole history of mankind is in us… and we don’t know how to read that… You’re not the reader… you are the book. When you read the book as a reader it has no meaning. But if you are the book, and the book is telling you; showing you the story, then you’ll not depend on a single person. Then one will be a light to one’s self.
Let other people labor at debates and difficulties and arguments.
