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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 free mind has power to achieve all things.
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.
Would you know others? Read yourself… and learn!
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.
What is not natively his own falls off and comes to nothing.
The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.
Human life changes not from the alteration of external forms, but only from the internal work of each man upon himself.
Some persons depress their own minds, despond at the first difficulty; and conclude that making any progress in knowledge, farther than serves their ordinary business, is above their capacities.
This place where you are right now God circled on a map for you. Wherever your eyes and arms and heart can move against the earth and the sky, the Beloved has bowed there. Our Beloved has bowed there knowing you were coming.
The sage will serve among the greatest and appear before those who lead.
He is great who is what he is from Nature, and who never reminds us of others.
The man who has no wound on his hand may touch poison with his hand, for poison cannot affect a man with no open wound. Neither is there evil for the man free of evil.
He that will keep a monkey should pay for the glasses he breaks.
If you reveal your secrets to the wind, you should not blame the wind for revealing them to the trees.
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.
There exists no other evil in nature than what you either do or suffer, and you are equally the author of both… Particular evil exists only in the sentiment of the suffering being; and this sentiment is not given to man by nature, but is of his own acquisition… Take away our errors and our vices… take away, in short, everything that is the work of man, and all that remains is good.
Nature has not said to me, “Be not poor,” still less, “Be rich.” She calls out to me, “Be independent!”
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.”
We are accustomed to see men scorn what they do not understand, and snarl at the good and the beautiful because it lies beyond their sympathies.
