"Thus men will lie on their backs,
talking about the fall of man,
and never make an effort
to get up."
- Henry David Thoreau
"In the deepest heart of all of us
there is a corner
in which the ultimate mystery of things works sadly."
- William James
"Listen to the cry of a woman in labor at the hour of giving birth -
look at the dying man's struggle at his last extremity,
and then tell me whether something that begins and ends thus
could be intended for enjoyment."
- Søren Kierkegaard
“The best and most beautiful things in the world
cannot be seen or even touched.
They must be felt with the heart."
- Helen Keller
“Many men go fishing all their lives
without knowing that it is not fish they are after.”
- Henry David Thoreau
"Man is a mystery:
if you spend your entire life trying to puzzle it out,
then do not say that you have wasted your time.
I occupy myself with this mystery,
because I want to be a man."
- Fyodor Dostoevsky
“One’s real life
is often the life
one does not lead.”
- Oscar Wilde
“Life's splendor
forever lies in wait
about each one of us in all its fullness,
but veiled from view, deep down, invisible, far off.
It is there, though, not hostile, not reluctant, not deaf.
If you summon it by the right word, by its right name,
it will come.”
- Franz Kafka
"Man is an isthmus between oblivions:
the millions of years before he was born,
and the millions of years after he dies.
But people say they don't have time to ask questions."
- Richard Rose
“The more deeply we are our true selves,
the less self is in us.”
- Meister Eckhart
“Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue.”
- Eugene O’Neill
“You do not need to leave your room.
Remain sitting at your table and listen.
Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet still and solitary.
The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked,
it has no choice,
it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.”
– Franz Kafka
“Creatures are all striving
after their primitive pure nature,
after their supreme perfection.”
- Meister Eckhart
“The gem cannot be polished without friction,
nor man perfected
without trials.”
- Chinese Proverb
"Beauty is a terrible and awful thing!
It is terrible because it has not been fathomed,
for God sets us nothing but riddles.
Here the boundaries meet
and all contradictions exist side by side.
- Fyodor Dostoevsky
"The awful thing
is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible.
God and the devil are fighting there
and the battlefield is the heart of man."
- Fyodor Dostoevsky
“Everything we do is futile,
but we must do it anyway.”
- Mahatma Gandhi
“The truth is here! Go where you will –
to Benares or to Mathura;
until you have God in your soul,
the whole world will seem meaningless to you.”
- Rabindranath Tagore
“The universe
is the externalization of the soul.”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
“This is an adventure
that every human must go through –
to learn to be anxious
in order that he may not perish . . .
whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way
has learned the ultimate . . .
The more profoundly he is in anxiety,
the greater is the man . . .
Then anxiety enters into his soul and searches out everything
And anxiously torments everything finite and petty out of him,
And then it leads him where he wants to go . . .
[Thus] the individual is educated into faith.”
- Soren Kierkegaard
“This is the true joy in life -
being used for a purpose
recognized by yourself as a mighty one;
being thoroughly worn out
before you are thrown on the scrap heap;
being a force of nature
instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances,
complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you consistent.”
- George Bernard Shaw
“Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so.
Aim above morality.
Be not simply good, be good for something...
Let nothing stand between you and the light...
When you travel to the Celestial City, carry no letter of introduction.
When you knock, ask to see God – none of his servants.
In what concerns you much,
do not think that you have companions,
know that you are alone in the world.”
- Henry David Thoreau
"All are but parts of one stupendous whole,
Whose body Nature is, and God the soul.”
- Alexander Pope
“Perhaps all the dragons of our lives
are princesses
who are only waiting to see us once
beautiful and noble and brave.”
- Ranier Maria Rilke
“The soul of man is his friend
when by the Spirit he has conquered his soul;
but when a man is not lord of his soul
then this becomes his own enemy.”
- The Bhagavad Gita
“As we advance in life
it becomes more and more difficult,
but in fighting the difficulties
the inmost strength of the heart is developed.”
- Vincent van Gogh
“It is what comes from the very depths of your heart
that moves heaven and earth.”
- Ganto, as quoted by Albert Low
“For those who believe,
no explanation is necessary;
for those who don't believe,
no explanation is possible."
- unknown
"The highest form of spiritual work
is the realization of the essence of man.
The final definition of man.
And with this definition - the definition of all things,
and a realization of the Nature, Absolute, or God behind all things."
- Richard Rose
“Truth
is always paradoxical.”
- Henry David Thoreau
“Let me respectfully remind you,
life and death
are of supreme importance.
Time swiftly passes by
And opportunity is lost.
Each of us should strive to awaken.
Awaken!
Take heed;
Do not squander your life.”
- The Evening Gatha
"Life cannot wait
until the sciences may have explained the universe scientifically.
We cannot put off living until we are ready.
The most salient characteristic of life is its coerciveness:
it is always urgent, "here and now" without any possible postponement.
Life is fired at us point-blank."
- Jose Ortega y Gasset
“You know these things as thoughts,
but your thoughts are not your experiences,
they are the echo and after-effect of your experiences:
as when your room trembles after a carriage goes past.
I however am sitting in the carriage,
and often I am the carriage itself.”
- Friedrich Nietzsche
“Resolve to be thyself,
and know that he
who finds himself,
loses his misery.”
- Coventry Patmore
“The end of man
is to let the spirit in him
permeate his whole being, his soul, flesh, and affections.
He attains his deepest self by losing his selfish ego.”
- Robert Musil
"Work out your own salvation with diligence.”
- The Buddha's final words
"Everything leads us to believe
that there exists a certain point of the intelligence
at which life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future
...cease to be perceived as opposites."
- Andre Breton
"We are all
deep in a hell
each moment of which
is a miracle."
- E. M. Cioran
"If you forget your feelings about things of the world,
they become enlightened teachings.
If you get emotional about enlightened teaching,
it becomes a worldly thing."
- Muso Kokushi
"If a man could understand
all the horror of the lives of ordinary people
who are turning round in a circle of insignificant interests and insignificant aims,
...he would understand that there can be only one thing that is serious for him -
to escape from the general law, to be free.
What can be serious for a man in prison who is condemned to death?
Only one thing: how to save himself, how to escape.
Nothing else is serious."
- P.D. Ouspensky
“The man who masters himself
is delivered from the force that binds all creatures.”
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"We do not receive wisdom,
we must discover it for ourselves,
after a journey through the wilderness
which no one else can make for us,
which no one else can spare us..."
- Marcel Proust
"Often people attempt to live their lives backwards:
they try to have more things, or more money,
in order to do more of what they want, so they will be happier.
The way it actually works is the reverse.
You must first be who you really are,
then, do what you need to do,
in order to have what you want."
- Margaret Young
"We are always getting ready to live,
but never living."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
“When you try to understand everything,
you will not understand anything.
The best way is to understand yourself,
and then you will understand everything.”
- Shunryu Suzuki
"A human being
is a part of the whole called by us universe,
a part limited in time and space.
He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings
as something separated from the rest,
a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness.
This delusion
is a kind of prison for us,
restricting us to our personal desires
and to affection for a few persons nearest to us.
Our task must be
to free ourselves from this prison
by widening our circle of compassion
to embrace all living creatures
and the whole of nature in its beauty."
- Albert Einstein
“There are moments of the secret ground
in which world order is beheld as present.
Then the tone is heard all of a sudden
whose uninterpretable score the ordered world is.
These moments are immortal; none are more evanescent.
They leave no content that could be preserved,
but their force enters into the creation and into man’s knowledge
and the radiation of its force penetrates the ordered world
and thaws it again and again.
Thus the history of the individual,
thus the history of the race.”
- Martin Buber
“Men live on the brink of mysteries and harmonies
into which they never enter,
and with their hand on the door-latch
they die outside.”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
“If the doors of perception were cleansed,
everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.”
- William Blake
“Live dangerously.”
- Friedrich Nietzsche
“God enters
by a private door
into every individual.”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Perhaps all the dragons of our lives
are princesses
who are only waiting to see us once
beautiful and noble and brave.”
- Ranier Maria Rilke
“I went into the woods,
because I wished to live deliberately,
to front only the essential facts of life,
and see if I could not learn what it had to teach,
and not, when I came to die,
discover that I had not lived.”
- Henry David Thoreau
"Whatever you can do or dream you can,
begin it.
Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it."
- Goethe
“To get at the core of God at his greatest,
one must first get into the core of himself at his least,
for no one can know God who has not first known himself.
Go to the depths of the soul, the secret place of the Most High, to the roots, to the heights:
for all that God can do is focused there.”
- Meister Eckhart
“Philosophy is really homesickness.”
- Novalis
“Men go forth to wonder
at the heights of mountains,
the huge waves of the sea,
the broad flow of the rivers,
the vast compass of the ocean,
the courses of the stars,
and they pass by themselves
without wondering.”
- St. Augustine
“You never enjoy the world aright,
till the sea itself floweth in your veins,
till you are clothed with the heavens,
and crowned with the stars;
and perceive yourself to be the sole heir of the whole world.”
- Thomas Traherne
"The whole world is a door of liberation,
but people are unwilling to enter it."
- Hui-Wu
"If a man could understand
all the horror of the lives of ordinary people
who are turning round in a circle of insignificant interests and insignificant aims,
if he could understand what they are losing, he would understand
that there can be only one thing that is serious for him -
to escape from the general law, to be free.
What can be serious for a man in prison who is condemned to death?
Only one thing:
how to save himself, how to escape:
nothing else is serious."
- P.D. Ouspensky
"It is not for man to seek, or even to believe in, God.
He only has to refuse his ultimate love to everything that is not God.
This refusal does not presuppose any belief.
It is enough to recognize what is obvious to any mind:
that all the goods of this world, past, present, and future, real or imaginary,
are finite and limited and radically incapable of satisfying
the desire that perpetually burns within us
for an infinite and perfect good."
- Simone Weil
"It is not for man to seek, or even to believe in, God.
He only has to refuse his ultimate love to everything that is not God.
This refusal does not presuppose any belief.
It is enough to recognize what is obvious to any mind:
that all the goods of this world, past, present, and future, real or imaginary,
are finite and limited and radically incapable of satisfying
the desire that perpetually burns within us
for an infinite and perfect good."
- Simone Weil
"I would like to beg you to have patience
with everything unresolved in your heart
and 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
"There is only one great adventure
and that is inwards towards the self."
- Henry Miller
"The true value of a human being
can be found in the degree to which
he has attained liberation from the self."
- Albert Einstein
"Mankind was not meant for idle pleasures."
- Henry David Thoreau
"We can sense the presence of God, but we cannot say who He is.
Even the greatest initiates will not be able to tell you.
And if you ask them, they will answer with silence,
because only silence can express the essence of the Deity.
Indeed, it is not enough to try and say everything God is,
and to say what He is not is not enough either.
To say He is love, wisdom, power, justice...is true,
but these words overlook the divine reality,
they say nothing about the infinity, the eternity and the perfection of God.
We cannot know God
by talking about Him or listening to others talk about Him.
The only way of knowing Him
is to enter deep within ourselves
in order to reach the region of silence."
- Omraam Mikhaël Aïvanhov
"My God is dark,
like a knot with a hundred roots that drink in silence."
- Ranier Maria Rilke
"We take too big a step
when we conjure up a God that surmounts all time and space
and then pretend to know Him on a first-name basis."
- Richard Rose
"There is thus an incessant multiplication of the inexhaustible One
and unification of the indefinitely Many.
Such are the beginnings and endings of worlds and of individuals beings:
expanded from a point without position or dimensions
and a now without date or duration."
Ananda K. Coomaraswamy
"The Divine is not meant to be discovered in heaven.
If that were the case, we would be in heaven, not here."
- Lee Lozowick
"At one moment or another in their lives,
human beings sense that they are linked
to a higher, mysterious world which has left its mark within them.
The difference between them is that some let this feeling fade
without attempting to examine it more closely or reflect on what it might mean,
whereas for others it is the starting point of an inner quest
that leads them to the Divinity."
- Omraam Mikhaël Aïvanhov
"I discovered later, and I am still discovering right up to this moment,
that it is only by living completely in this world that one learns to have faith.
By this-worldliness I mean living unreservedly
in lifes' duties, problems, successes and failures.
In so doing, we throw ourselves completely into the arms of God.
Taking seriously, not our own sufferings, but those of God in the world.
That, I think, is faith."
- Dietrich Bonhoeffer
"...it is not the intellectual knowledge of the Greek.
It is not the kind of knowledge that man can have through reason alone,
or perhaps not through reason at all;
he has it rather though body and blood, bones and bowels,
through trust and anger and confusion and love and fear;
through his passionate adhesion in faith
to the Being whom he can never intellectually know.
This kind of knowledge a man has only though living, not reasoning,
and perhaps in the end he cannot even say what it is he knows;
yet it is knowledge all the same..."
- William Barrett
"There is a difference between one and another hour of life,
in their authority and subsequent effect.
Our faith comes in moments; our vice is habitual.
Yet there is a depth in those brief moments
which constrains us to ascribe more reality to them
than to all other experiences."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The infinite seeks the intimate presence of the finite,
the finite to disappear in the infinite.
I do not know whose scheme this is...
that the bound should be on a search after freedom -
freedom asking to be housed in the bound."
- Tagore
"To live is the rarest thing in the world.
Most people exist; that is all."
- Oscar Wilde
"The will of God
is not a system of rules established from the outset.
It is something new and different in each different situation in life.
And for this reason a man
must forever re-examine what the will of God may be.
The will of God
may lie deeply concealed
beneath a number of other possibilities."
- Dietrich Bonhoeffer
"Whosoever hears the truth in the morning
is not afraid to die in the evening."
- unknown
"Be still,
and know that I am God."
- Psalms 46:10
"What the superior man seeks
is in himself."
- Confucius
"Be ye therefore perfect,
as your father in heaven is perfect."
- Matthew 5:48
"...some way he could work the fat off his soul
the way a fighter went into the mountains
to work and train in order to burn it out of his body..."
- Ernest Hemingway
"We must have richness
of soul"
- Antiphanes
"It behooved that there should be sin;
but all shall be well,
and all shall be well,
and all manner of thing shall be well."
- Juliana of Norwich
"No human thing
is of serious importance."
- Plato
"The unexamined life
is not worth living."
- Socrates
"No evil can happen to a good man,
either in life or after death."
- Socrates
"Men reject their prophets and slay them,
but they love their martyrs
and honor those whom they have slain."
- Fyodor Dostoyevski
"The awful thing is that
beauty is mysterious as well as terrible.
God and devil are fighting there,
and the battlefield is the heart of man."
- Fyodor Dostoyevski
"We are alone
with everything we love."
- Novalis
"We are more closely connected to the invisible
than to the visible."
- Novalis
"Knowledge is only one half.
Faith is the other."
- Novalis
"All happiness or unhappiness
solely depends upon the quality
of the objects to which we are attached to by love. "
- Baruch Spinoza
"We feel and know
that we are eternal."
- Baruch Spinoza
"If there is righteousness in the heart,
there will be beauty in the character.
If there is beauty in the character,
there will be harmony in the home.
If there is harmony in the home,
there will be order in the nation.
If there is order in the nation,
there will be peace in the world."
- Confucious
"A man who as a physical being
is always turned toward the outside,
thinking that his happiness lies outside him,
finally turns inward
and discovers that the source is within him.
- Søren Kierkegaard
"The kingdom of heaven
is within you."
Luke 17:21
"For what shall it profit a man,
if he shall gain the world,
and lose his own soul?"
- Mark 8:36
"We do not live
for idle amusement."
- Henry David Thoreau
"The function of prayer
is not to influence God,
but rather
to change the nature
of the one who prays."
- Søren Kierkegaard
"The basic issue of human suffering
including moral, religious, and psychological problems
has been traced to one ultimate cause, to wit,
self-estrangement, alienation from existence, loss of contact with Being.
Emotional conflicts, social discords, political wars -
all these, in final analysis,
flow from man's loss of contact with the ground of existence."
- Haridas Chaudhuri
"Every man must discover for himself
what the Good Life is
and he can find it
if only he will consult himself
and his own nature alone."
- Henry David Thoreau
"All Christian religion consists wholly in this:
to learn to know ourselves,
whence we come
and what we are."
- Jacob Boehme
"Forgetfulness of the Self
is the source of all misery."
- Ramana Maharshi
"Until God has taken possession of him,
no human being can have faith,
but only simple belief;
and it hardly matters whether or not he has such a belief,
because he will arrive at faith equally well
through disbelief."
- Simone Weil
“If you would be a real seeker after truth,
it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt,
as far as possible, all things.”
– Rene Descartes
"The believer is happy;
the doubter is wise."
- Nietszche
"Human beings fall into traps on the right side or on the left side
when they live in the finite to the exclusion of the infinite,
or when they seek freedom to the exclusion of necessity,
or when they live in the temporal while ignoring the eternal.
The goal of human life, then,
is the difficult task of holding together these paradoxical elements in a creative synthesis.
The highest and truest pathway in life
can be compared to walking along a narrow mountain ridge.
It is always possible to fall off the ridge to the right or to the left,
but the successful walker continues forward maintaining a balance."
Charles K. Bellinger
"Every man is on earth to symbolize something he is ignorant of
and to realize a particle or a mountain of the invisible materials
that will serve to build the City of God." - Léon Bloy
"We have come to earth to learn to love God who has created and loves us.
When we learn how to love Him we shall understand the meaning of our life,
and our relationships with others will become clear." - Peter Deunov
"The basic issue of human suffering including moral, religious, and psychological problems
has been traced to one ultimate cause, to wit,
self-estrangement, alienation from existence, loss of contact with Being.
Emotional conflicts, social discords, political wars -
all these, in the final analysis,
flow from man's loss of contact with the ground of existence."
- Haridas Chaudhuri
"I have discovered that all human evil comes from this,
man's being unable to sit still in a room."
- Blaise Pascal
"All my apparent 'trouble' derives from the sleep of my faith in the perfect Reality...
In short everything appears to be wrong in me because the fundamental idea
that everything is perfectly, eternally, and totally positive,
is asleep in the center of my being, because it is not awakened, living and active therein.
There at last we touch upon the first painful phenomenon,
that from which all the rest of our painful phenomena derive."
- Hubert Benoit
"The highest point a man can attain
is not Knowledge, or Virtue, or Goodness, or Victory,
but something even greater, more heroic and more despairing:
Sacred Awe!"
- Nikos Kazantzakis
"Why are you unhappy?
Because 99.9 percent Of everything you think and of everything you do,
is for yourself - And there isn't one."
- Wei Wu Wei
"Where am I? Who tricked me into this whole thing and leaves me standing here?
Who am I? How did I get into the world? Why was I not asked about it?
Why was I not informed of the rules and regulations? How did I get involved?
Why should I be involved? If I am compelled to be involved, where is the manager?
I have something to say about this. Is there no manager? To whom shall I make my complaint?"
--Soren Kierkegaard