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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!
To be happy means to be self-sufficient.
He is wise who is wise to himself.
Our thinking machine possesses the capacity to be convinced of anything you like, provided it is repeatedly and persistently influenced in the required direction. A thing that may appear absurd to start with will in the end become rationalized, provided it is repeated sufficiently often and with sufficient conviction.
Do not do to others that which would anger you if others did it to you.
Great men are the true men, the men in whom Nature has succeeded.
Why does no man confess his vices? Because he is still in them. It is for a waking man to tell of his dreams.
If you would convince a man that he does wrong, do right. Men will believe what they see.
We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark. The real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.
He who learns the rules of wisdom, without conforming to them in his life, is like a man who labors in his field, but did not sow.
If man were a unity instead of being a multiplicity, he would have true individuality.
This is the sum of duty: Do naught unto others which would cause you pain if done to you.
The great are only great because we are on our knees. Let us rise up.
Whatever is not yours, abandon it. When you have abandoned it, that will lead to your welfare and happiness for a long time.
What is it that is not yours? Material form is not yours. Abandon it. When you have abandoned it, that will lead to your welfare and happiness for a long time.
A few golden apples are rolled, and the world scrambles after them. You were never bound by laws, Nature never had a bond for you… We have placed ourselves in this net, and will have to get out… Never forget this is only a momentary state, and that we have to pass through it.
God is gathering us out of all regions till he can make resurrection of our own hearts from the very earth, and teach us that we are all of one substance, and members of one another. For the one who loves his neighbor loves God, and the one who loves God, loves his own soul.
The friends of Job appear on the scene as advisers and “consolers,” offering Job the fruits of their moral scientia. But when Job insists that his sufferings have no explanation and that he cannot discover the reason for them through conventional ethical concepts, his friends turn into accusers, and curse Job as a sinner. Thus, instead of consolers, they become torturers by virtue of their very morality, and in so doing, while claiming to be advocates of God, they act as instruments of the devil.
I love all men. I know that at bottom they cannot be otherwise, and under all the false and overloaded and glittering masquerade, there is, in every man, a noble nature beneath; only they cannot bring it out, and whatever they do that is false and cunning and evil, there still remains the sentence of our Great Example: “Forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
Great men stand like solitary towers in the city of God, and secret passages, running deep beneath external nature, give their thoughts intercourse with higher intelligences, which strengthens and consoles them, and of which the laborers on the surface do not even dream.
I beg you to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
I have held many things in my hands, and I have lost them all. But whatever I have placed in God’s hands, that I still possess.