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!
What appears to be generosity is usually nothing more than disguised ambition, which despises petty self-interests in order to gain greater self-interests.
Be free, gay, simple, a child. But be a sturdy child who fears nothing.
You cannot talk to a summer insect about ice.
When your presence flooded me with its light I hoped that within it I might find Ultimate Reality at its most tangible. But now that I have in fact laid hold on you, you who are utter consistency, and feel myself borne by you, I realize that my deepest hidden desire was not to possess you, but to be possessed.
The freer you feel yourself in the presence of another, the more free is he.
We think few people sensible except those who are of our own opinion.
Die before ye die!
Never let us be discouraged with ourselves. It is not when we are conscious of our faults that we are the most wicked, on the contrary, we are less so. We see by a brighter light, and let us remember for our consolation, that we never perceive our sins till we begin to cure them.
He alone knows himself in the best way possible who thinks of himself as being nothing.
A philosopher’s school is a hospital. You should feel discomfort, not pleasure, in it, for on entering, no one is well and whole. One has a disjointed shoulder, another a wound, a third suffers from a cut, and a fourth has a headache. Am I then to sit down and give you a treat of pretty words and empty sentiments, so you may applaud me and depart, with neither shoulder nor wound, cut, nor headache any better for your visit?
They that be whole need not a physician, but they that are sick.
Are you less a slave by being loved and favored by your master?… Your master favors you; he will soon beat you.
I am pressed down with conceit;
Conceit, my comfort and my injury.
None are superior to what you might become.
The very discovery of these hidden things is in itself a purifying experience! The soul needs to discover what is inside. The self nature needs to see what it really is, and what it is like, right to the very bottom.
Every further stage of ourselves is within us, above us. Below us lies what we are already, what we have done before. Below us, behind us, is the passive surrender to things, the inertia of the past, the habits of years, and the passive, sensual mind — the mind of the senses — with its sole belief in appearances and passing time. At any point in our lives we are thus between two opposing forces: the force of the realized and the force of the unrealized, what we are and have been, and what we may be. And what we may be is already there, as unhappy feeling, as incompleteness.
Ye must love beyond yourselves. So ye must learn to love.
Oppose not rage while rage is in its force, but give it way a while and let it waste.
Anything that the mind thinks, it can unthink. If, therefore, by the law of cause and effect we have produced unpleasant conditions, we should be able by this same law to produce an entirely different effect.
Self is the whole evil of fallen nature; self-denial is our capacity of being saved; humility is our savior. This is every man’s short lesson of life, and he that has well learned it, is scholar enough, and has had all the benefit of a most finished education.