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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!
Man, if you are anything at all, strive to walk alone and hold communion with yourself, instead of hiding in the chorus of men. Think, look around, arouse yourself, so that you will know who you are!
You are not broken… you’re just disconnected from the Divine.
Why does no man confess his vices? Because he is yet in them. It is for a waking man to tell his dream.
The bell never rings of itself; unless someone handles or moves it, it is silent.
If he carries out all these rules while he observes himself, a man will record a whole series of very important aspects of his being. To begin with, he will record with unmistakable clearness the fact that his actions, thoughts, feelings, and words are the result of external influences and that nothing comes from himself. He will understand and see that he is in fact an automaton acting under the influences of external stimuli. He will feel his complete mechanicalness. Everything “happens,” he cannot “do” anything. He is a machine controlled by accidental shocks from outside. Each shock calls to the surface one of his “I’s.” A new shock and that ‘I’ disappears and a different one takes its place. Another small change in the environment and again there is a new ‘I.’
To know is to be ignorant. Not to know is the beginning of wisdom.
Grief should be the instructor of the wise… sorrow is knowledge. They who know the most must mourn the deepest o’er the fatal, truth, — the tree of knowledge is not that of life.
Those who do not observe the movements of their own minds must of necessity be unhappy.
The Almighty created the angels and conferred reason upon them, and He created the beasts and conferred passion upon them, and He created man and conferred reason and passion both upon him. He whose reason prevails over his passion is higher than the angels, and he whose passion prevails over his reason is lower than the beasts.
Beast, birds, and insects, even to the minutest and meanest of their kind, act with the unerring providence of instinct; man, the while, who possesses a higher faculty, abuses it, and therefore goes blundering on.
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
Progress is the law of life; man is not man as yet.
I have a body on which other bodies act, and which acts reciprocally upon them. This reciprocal action is certain; but my will is independent of my senses. I can either consent to, or resist their impressions. I am either vanquished or victor, and can perceive clearly within myself when I act according to my will, and when I submit to be governed by my passions. I always have the power to will.
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting.
The soul that rises with us, our life’s star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting.
And cometh from afar;
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home.
Like the monist I plunge into the all-inclusive One. But the one is so perfect that as it receives me and I lose myself in it, I can find in it the ultimate perfection of my own individuality.
He who would be master of himself shall win it, if he bravely strives.
Self-interest is but the survival of the animal in us. Humanity only begins for man with self-surrender.
When the mountain disappears as a necessity to climb, the mountain climber disappears as a necessity to exist.
All things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so them, for this is the law and the prophets.
One doth not know how much an ill word may empoison liking.
