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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!
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.
Be the change you wish to see in the world.
Who is it that is to become free? You, I, we. Free from what? From everything that is not you, not I, not we. I, therefore, am the seed that is to be freed from all wrappings, and free from all confining shells.
Courage comes next to prudence as a quality of mind very essential to happiness… Our motto should be “No Surrender,” and far from yielding to the ills of life, let us take fresh courage from misfortune… Let our attitude be such that we would not quake even if the world fell in ruins about us.
When the ship does not yield to the rudder, it yields to the rock.
Few people are wise enough to prefer useful reproof to treacherous praise.
A horse which is harnessed to a wagon along with other horses is not free… The same situation is true of man.
How can He grant you what you do not desire to receive?
You hurt people outside of you because you hurt inside of you.
Every man’s condition is a solution in hieroglyph to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life before he apprehends it as truth.
