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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!
There is no greater punishment of evil than that it is dissatisfied with itself and its deeds.
There are false heroes and false devotees; and as true heroes never are the ones who make much noise about their deeds of honor, just so true devotees, whom we should follow, are not the ones who make so much vain show. What! Will you find no difference between hypocrisy and genuine devotion?
Reward? Do you seek any greater reward for being a good man than doing what is right and just?… Does it seem you a small and worthless thing to be a good man, and therefore a happy man?
If you are pained by any external thing, it is not this thing that disturbs you, but your own judgment about it. It is in your power to erase this judgment now. If anything in your own nature gives you pain, who hinders you from correcting your opinion?
Rich, only to be wretched, thy great fortunes
Are made thy chief afflictions.
The greatest part of mankind, nay, of all Christians, may be said to be asleep. That particular way of life, which takes up each man’s mind, thoughts and actions, may be very well called his particular dream. The learned and the ignorant, the rich and the poor, are all in the same state of slumber, passing away a short life in a different kind of dream.
The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together: our virtues would be proud, if our faults whipped them not; and our crimes would despair, if they were not cherished by our virtues.
Therefore, if God’s essence is to be seen at all, it must be that the intellect sees it through the divine essence itself… so that in that vision the divine essence is both the object and the medium of vision.
Let not that which in another is contrary to nature be an evil to you, for you are not made by nature to be depressed with others, nor to be unhappy with others, but to be happy with them.
For thirty years I sought God. But when I looked carefully I found that in reality God was the seeker and I the sought.
Man does not wish to come out of spiritual servitude into spiritual liberty, for the reason, first, that he does not know what spiritual servitude is and what spiritual liberty is; he does not possess the truths that teach this; and without truths, spiritual servitude is believed to be freedom, and spiritual freedom to be servitude.
It is good to tame the mind.
No man is damaged by an action which is not his own.
It only seems as if there’s something more important for you to do than to just quietly be yourself.
Why do you stay in prison when the door is so wide open?
I am in the process of bringing all my defects into the light for the purpose of getting rid of them. We never know how rich we are until we break up housekeeping!
No one is useless in this world who lightens the burden of it for any one else.
The center of every man’s existence is a dream. Death, disease, and insanity are merely material accidents, like a toothache or a twisted ankle. That these brutal forces always besiege and often capture the citadel does not prove that they are the citadel.
Don’t be a cynic, and bewail and bemoan. Omit the negative propositions. Don’t waste yourself in rejection, nor bark against the bad, but chant the beauty of the good.
The perfect man employs his mind as a mirror. It grasps nothing. It refuses nothing. It receives, but does not keep.
