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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!
Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.
In a village or in a forest, on land or sea, wherever venerable persons dwell, that place is delightful.
To the generality of men you cannot give a stronger hint for them to impose upon you than by imposing upon yourself.
I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest.
A sage is not only kind to the kind but also kind to the unkind.
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.
People stop being children when they start laughing at their ignorance.
Whatever cannot obey itself, is commanded. Such is the nature of living things.
Every duty we omit, obscures some truth we should have known.
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.
One believes what one wishes to believe.
We become so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others that at last we are disguised to ourselves.
Walk in My presence and you will be perfect.
Nothing is so easy as to deceive one’s self, for what we wish to believe, we readily believe, but such expectations are often inconsistent with the real state of things.
When all limitations are transcended, nothing remains but the One Will that is ‘I.’
If it is not advantageous, do not move. If objectives can not be attained, do not employ the army. Unless endangered, do not engage in warfare. The ruler cannot mobilize the army out of personal anger. The general cannot engage in battle because of personal frustration. When it is advantageous, move When not advantageous, stop. Anger can revert to happiness, annoyance can revert to joy, but a vanquished state cannot be revived The dead cannot be brought back to life.
Energy is spent chiefly on unnecessary and unpleasant emotions, on the expectation of unpleasant things, possible and impossible, on bad moods, on unnecessary haste, nervousness, irritability, imagination, day-dreaming, and so on. Energy is wasted on the wrong work of centers, on unnecessary tension of the muscles out of all proportion to the work produced, on perpetual chatter which absorbs an enormous amount of energy, on the “interest” continually taken in things happening around us or to other people and having in fact no interest whatever, on the constant waste of the force of “attention,” and so on, and so on.
To sum up all in a word: Nothing has separated us from God but our own will, or rather our own will is our separation from God. All the disorder and corruption, and malady of our nature, lies in a certain fixedness of our own will, imagination, and desires, wherein we live to ourselves, are our own center and circumference, act wholly from ourselves, according to our own will, imagination and desires. There is not the smallest degree of evil in us but what arises from this selfishness, because we are thus all in all to ourselves.
Every man stamps his value on himself. The price we set for ourselves is given us… Man is made great or small by his own will.
Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.