Browse the Living Book by "The Seeker"

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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!

One Journey Quotations

 

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.

G. I. Gurdjieff (1866 – 1949)

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.

Buddhism (circa 500 B.C.E.)

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.

Vivekananda (1863 – 1902)

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.

Thomas Merton (1915 – 1968)

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.”

Berthold Auerbach (1812 – 1882)

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.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807 – 1882)

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.

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875 – 1926)