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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 are two basic duties for man in this life: one is to serve nature and the other is to find God.
No evil man is happy.
The harmony and happiness of man
Yields to the wealth of nations; that which lifts
His nature to the heaven of its pride,
Is bartered for the poison of his soul;
The weight that drags to earth his towering hopes,
Blighting all prospect but of selfish gain,
Withering all passion but of slavish fear,
Extinguishing all free and generous love
Of enterprise and daring, even the pulse
That fancy kindles in the beating heart
To mingle with sensation, it destroys,
Leaves nothing but the sordid lust of self,
The groveling hope of interest and gold,
Unqualified, unmingled, unredeemed
Even by hypocrisy.
How vainly seek
The selfish for that happiness denied
To aught but virtue! Blind and hardened, they,
Who hope for peace amid the storms of care,
Who covet power they know not how to use,
And sigh for pleasure they refuse to give,
Madly they frustrate still their own designs;
And, where they hope that quiet to enjoy
Which virtue pictures, bitterness of soul,
Pining regrets, and vain repentances,
Disease, disgust and lassitude pervade
Their valueless and miserable lives.
A man of intellect is like an artist who gives a concert without help from anyone else, playing on a single instrument — perhaps a piano, which is a small orchestra in itself. Such a man is a small world in himself, and the effects produced by various instruments together, he produces all by himself, in the unity of his own consciousness.
No varnish can hide the grain of the wood… the more varnish you put on, the more the grain will express itself.
Towards the throne they all strive: it is their madness — as if happiness sat on the throne.
Do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?
There is an inward state of the heart which makes truth credible the moment it is stated. It is credible to some men because of what they are. Love is credible to a loving heart; purity is credible to a pure mind; life is credible to a spirit in which life beats strongly — it is incredible to other men.
Each one sees what he carries in his heart.
Simplicity of character is the natural result of profound thought.
We are upset at being deceived by our enemies, and betrayed by our friends, and yet we are often content to be deceived by ourselves.
To those who seek truth in conventionalized religion:
Until college and minaret have crumbled
this holy work of ours will not be done.
Until faith becomes rejection
And rejection becomes belief
There will be no true believer.
I like your silence, it the more shows off
Your wonder.
Wander all alone, with nothing to call upon, nothing to depend on, and God, who exists, will keep his promise to you.
Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another, “What! You too? I thought I was the only one.”
Who stands already on heaven’s topmost dome needs not to search for ladders.
The worst of human errors spring in most cases from the fact that men who stand on a low intellectual level, when they encounter events of a higher order, instead of trying to rise to the higher level from which these events can be rightly viewed, and making an effort to understand them, judge them by their own low standards, and the less they know of what they speak, the more arrogant and fixed are their judgements.
Man is nothing but contradiction; the less he knows it the more dupe he is.
He is free who lives as he wishes to live. He is the man who cannot suffer injury, who cannot be hindered or compelled, whose impulses are not blocked, whose desires attain their purpose, who does not fall into whatever he wishes to avoid… So, no wicked man lives like this, and so he is not free.
The most virtuous of all men is he who contents himself with being virtuous without seeking to appear so.
