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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!
It follows absolutely, that one who uses his understanding correctly, can fall a prey to no sorrow.
There is nothing so delightful as the hearing or the speaking of truth. For this reason, there is no conversation so agreeable as that of a man of integrity, who hears without any intention to betray, and speaks without any intention to deceive.
It is love that asks, that seeks, that knocks, that finds, and that is faithful to what it finds.
Remember Augustine’s dictum, “Amor meus, pondus meum.” “My love is a weight, a gravitational force.” As one loves temporal things, one gains an illusory substantiality and a selfhood which gravitates “downward,” that is to say acquires a need for things lower in the scale of being than itself. It depends on these things for its own self-affirmation. In the end this gravitational pull becomes an enslavement to material and temporal cares, and finally to sin. Yet this weight itself is an illusion, a result of the “puffing up” of pride, a “swelling” without reality. The self that appears to be weighed down by its love and carried away to material things is, in fact, an unreal thing. Yet it retains an empirical existence of its own: it is what we think of as ourselves.
The body is a device to calculate
the astronomy of the spirit.
Look through that astrolabe
and become oceanic.
Finally, the mind of man is so constructed that it is taken far more with disguises than with realities.
The Earth and myself are of one mind.
Learn the value of a man’s words and expressions and you know him. Each man has a measure of his own for everything; this he offers you inadvertently in his words.
Do as the heavens have done, forget your evil;
with them forgive yourself.
He who diligently attends, pointedly asks, calmly speaks, coolly answers, and ceases when he has no more to say, is in possession of some of the best requirements of conversation.
Let other people labor at debates and difficulties and arguments.
The more the marble wastes, the more the statue grows.
It is useless for the “self” to try to “purify itself,” or for the “self” to “make a place in itself” for God.
Whoever knows himself knows God.
We can only be as free as we’re willing to be truthful about ourself.
If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?
I am fully qualified to work as a doorkeeper,
and for this reason:
What is inside me, I don’t let out:
What is outside me, I don’t let in.
If someone comes in, he goes right out again —
He has nothing to do with me at all.
I am a Doorkeeper of the Heart, not a lump of wet clay.
If you want your judgement to be accepted, express it coolly and without passion. All violence has its origin in the will, and so, if your judgement is expressed with vehemence, people will consider it an effort of will, and not the outcome of knowledge, which is in its nature calm and unemotional.
Kindness is to use one’s will to guard one’s speech and conduct so as not to injure anyone.
The saints are the living ones, and the living ones are the saints.