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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!
I can easier teach twenty what were good to be done, than be one of the twenty to follow mine own teaching.
No one can see these truths in the manner that I have presented them, without being in some degree inclined to believe them, and in some degree stirred up to act in conformity to them.
If you are depressed you are living in the past.
If you are anxious you are living in the future.
If you are at peace you are living in the present.
Blessed art thou therefore if that thou canst stand still from self-thinking and self-willing, and canst stop the wheel of they imagination and senses… forasmuch as hereby thou mayest arrive at length to see the great Salvation of God being made capable of all manner of Divine sensations and Heavenly communications. Since it is nought indeed but thine own hearing and willing that do hinder thee, so that thou dost not see and hear God.
How can a soul which misunderstands itself have a sure idea of other creatures?
When the ego is brought to its knees in the dust, humiliated in its own eyes, however esteemed or feared, envied or respected in other men’s eyes, the way is opened for grace’s influx. Be assured that this complete humbling of the inner man will happen again and again and again until he is purified of all pride.
There is nothing new in the idea of sleep. People have been told almost since the creation of the world that they are asleep and that they must awaken. How many times is this said in the Gospels, for instance? “Awake,” “watch,” “sleep not.” Christ’s disciples even slept when he was praying in the Garden of Gethsemane for the last time. It is all there.
To affect a quality, and to plume yourself upon it, is just to confess that you do not have it. Whether it is courage, or learning, or intellect, or wit, or success with women, or riches, or social position, or whatever else it may be that a man boasts of, you may conclude by his boasting about it that this is precisely the direction in which he is rather weak, for if a man really possesses any faculty to the full, it will not occur to him to make a great show of affecting it; he is quite content to know that he has it.
The moment we make up our mind, that we are going on with this determination to exact God over all, we step out of the world’s parade. We shall find ourself out of adjustment to the ways of the world, and increasingly so as we make progress in The Holy Way. We shall acquire a new viewpoint; a new and different psychology will be formed within us; a new power will begin to surprise us by its upsurging and its outgoing.
He employs his emotion who can make no use of his reason.
Stand, stand!… Nothing routs us but
The villainy of our fears.
Tradition becomes our security, and when the mind is secure it is in decay.
God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose.
The fatal tendency of mankind to leave off thinking about a thing when it is no longer doubtful, is the cause of half their errors.
The most positive men are the most credulous, since they most believe themselves, and advise most with their falsest flatterer and worst enemy: their own self-love.
They who have light in themselves will not revolve as satellites.
Be teachable. That is the whole secret.
Does anyone do wrong? It is to himself that he does the wrong.
It is our prerogative as spiritual beings, that we can rise above the feeling of the moment, above all that is isolated and individual.
When I am angry my whole mind has become a huge wave of anger. I feel it, see it, handle it, can easily manipulate it, can fight with it, but I shall not succeed perfectly in the fight until I can get down below. A man says something very harsh to me, and I begin to feel that I am getting heated, and he goes on till I am perfectly angry, and forget myself, identify myself with anger. When he first began to abuse me I still thought, “I am going to be angry.” Anger was one thing and I was another, but when I became angry, I was anger. These feelings have to be controlled in the germ, the root, in their fine forms, before even we have become conscious that they are acting on us.