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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!
Let other people labor at debates and difficulties and arguments.
Devote six years to your work, but in the seventh go into solitude or among strangers so that your friends, by remembering what you were, do not prevent you from being what you have become.
A happy life is one which is in accordance with its own nature.
All the water in the world,
However hard it tried,
Could never, never sink a ship,
Unless it got inside.
And all the evil in the world,
The blackest kind of sin.
Can never hurt you one least bit —
Unless you let it in!
Men go abroad to wonder at the heights of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses of the rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motions of the stars, and they pass by themselves without wondering.
To speak and to offend, with some people, are but one and the same thing.
The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.
The happiness we receive from ourselves is greater than that which we obtain from our surroundings.
Thou that has given so much to me, give one thing more: a grateful heart. Not thankful when it please me, as if thy blessings had spare days. But such a heart whose pulse may be thy praise.
The sage will serve among the greatest and appear before those who lead.
There are moods in which we court suffering, in the hope that here, at least, we shall find reality, sharp peaks and edges of truth. But it turns out to be scene-painting and counterfeit. The only thing grief has taught me is to know how shallow it is.
He is well paid that is well satisfied.
You often say, “I would give, but only to the deserving.” The trees in your orchard say not so, nor the flocks in your pastures. They give that they may live, for to withhold is to perish.
So hath God by rational methods enabled us to love others better than ourselves, and thereby made us the most glorious creatures. Had we not loved ourselves at all, we could never have been obliged to love anything. So that self-love is the basis of all love. But when we do love ourselves, and self-love is satisfied infinitely in all its desires and possible demands, then it is easily led to regard the Benefactor more than itself, and for His sake overflows abundantly to all others. So that God by satisfying my self-love, hath enabled and engaged me to love others.
Most are, in effect, deaf to that internal voice which, nevertheless, calls to them so loud and emphatically. A mere machine is evidently incapable of thinking… whereas in man there exists something perpetually prone to expand, and to burst the chains by which it is confined.
You will be of as much worth to others as you are to yourself.
Peter of Damascus assures us that “nothing is better than to realize one’s weakness and ignorance, and nothing is worse than not to be aware of them.”
Beware of dissipating your powers; strive constantly to concentrate them.
If he falls in this conflict, then he falls by his own hand, for physically and externally understood, I can fall by the hand of another, but spiritually there is only one who can destroy me, and that is myself.
I leave it to other people to call me this or that. It matters little what anyone is called.
