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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!
And we see that with all our imagined unworthiness and fear, with all our doubt and desire, it’s hard to be loving all the time. But it’s harder not be loving.
By closing the eyes and slumbering, and consenting to be deceived by shows, men establish and confirm their daily life of routine and habit everywhere, which still is built on purely illusory foundations. Children, who play life, discern its true law.
However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names.
Man is man, and master of his fate.
If you are surprised at the number of our maladies, count our cooks.
All powerful souls have kindred with each other.
Along this sham path life is chiefly a dressing-up, an emptiness, a make-believe, in which we seek to be like something rather than really to be something. In this sense, then, no one is really doing.
The true man of God sits in the midst of his fellow men, and rises and eats and sleeps and marries and buys and sells and gives and takes in the bazaars, and spends the days with other people, and yet never forgets God even for a single moment.
But when the observer is the observed — when the thinking is the experience — then there is no more thought.
The work an unknown good man has done is like a vein of water flowing hidden underground, secretly making the ground green.
He that is proud eats up himself: pride is his own glass, his own trumpet, his own chronicle; and whatever praises itself but in the deed, devours the deed in the praise.
It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by the dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.
When the whole world is running headlong towards the precipice, one who walks in the opposite direction is looked at as being crazy.
Learning is but an adjunct to ourself,
And where we are our learning likewise is.
He that walks with wise men shall be wise.
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.
We endeavor to make a virtue of the faults we are unwilling to correct.
The key to every man is his thought. Sturdy and defying though he look, he has a helm which he obeys… He can only be reformed by showing him a new idea which commands his own.
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
Five remembrances Buddhist monks chant each day: I will lose my youth, my health, my loved ones, everything I hold dear and, finally, life itself… by the very nature of being human.