Browse the Living Book by "The Seeker"

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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!

One Journey Quotations

 

There is no coming to consciousness without pain. People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own soul. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.

Carl Jung (1875 – 1961)

The man who spends his life in sensual acts performs acts that depend on temporary causes beyond his control. Of himself he does nothing, but it seems to him that he is acting independently. In reality, all that he imagines he is doing by himself is done through him by a higher power; he is not the creator of life but its prisoner. But the man who devotes his life to the recognition and practice of the truth revealed to him unites himself with the source of universal life, and accomplishes not personal or individual acts that depend upon time and space, but acts that have no cause, but are in themselves causes of all else, and have an endless significance.

Leo Tolstoy (1828 – 1910)

If we were faultless, we should not be so much annoyed by the defects of those with whom we associate. If we were to acknowledge honestly that we have not virtue enough to bear patiently with our neighbor’s weaknesses, we should show our own imperfection, and this alarms our vanity.

Francois Fenelon (1651 – 1715)

Whatever you think appears in consciousness as a show. That’s the way thought works to display its content, as a show of imagination. Therefore if you think the observer is separate from the observed, it’s going to appear in consciousness as two different entities. The point is that the words will seem to be coming from the observer who knows, who sees, and therefore they are the truth, they are a description of the truth. That’s the illusion.

David Bohm (1917 – 1992)

How much confusion of thought comes from our interest in self, and from our vanity when thinking “I am so great” or “I have done this wonderful deed.” The thought of your ego stands between your rational nature and truth, banish it, and then you will see things as they are. He who thinks correctly will rid himself of ignorance and acquire wisdom. The ideas of “I am” and “I shall be” or “I shall not be” do not occur to a clear thinker.

Buddha (circa 560 – 483 B.C.E.)

The man of inner life is easily aware of himself, since he is never totally absorbed in outward affairs. Therefore, his exterior occupations and necessary activities do not distract him, and he adjusts himself to things as they come. The man whose inner life is well-ordered, is not bothered by strange and troublesome ways of others. A man is blocked and distracted by such things only as he permits himself to be.

Thomas a Kempis (circa 1379 – 1471)