We who are like senseless children
Shrink from suffering,
But love its causes.
We hurt ourselves;
Our pain is self-inflicted!
Why should others
Be the object of our anger?

~ Shantideva

You speak of doing good to the world. Is the world such a small thing? And who are you, pray, to do good to the world? First realise God, see Him by means of spiritual discipline. If He imparts power you can do good to others; otherwise not.

~ Sri Ramakrishna

The significance of that 'absolute commandment', know thyself — whether we look at it in itself or under the historical circumstances of its first utterance — is not to promote mere self-knowledge in respect of the particular capacities, character, propensities, and foibles of the single self. The knowledge it commands means that of man's genuine reality — of what is essentially and ultimately true and real — of spirit as the true and essential being.

~ Hegel

Myth is neither right nor wrong, logical nor contradictory. It has its birth in another sphere where consistency, truth, and reality are measured by other standards. This sphere is intuition and experience. . . . [which] does not mean that myth is ambiguous, equivocal, or deceptive. The incompatibility of contradictory meanings is characteristic of logic and reason, not of intuition and experience. The myth conceals many meanings, the interrelations of which may vary and appear difficult to understand. This is due to the fact that the myth stems from strata of the soul deeper than consciousness and therefore beyond the reach of our thought.

~ Ruth Nanda Anshen

Discard every self-seeking motive
as soon as it is seen and you need
not search for truth; truth will find
you.

- Nisargadatta Maharaj

You are what all happenings happen in. What happens must happen so remain unaffected as peace. Be peaceful and this peace will spread. What rises from peace is peace and what rises from confusion is confusion. So be peace and give this to the universe, it is all you should do. Even thinking "I am peace" disturbs this peace, so just be quiet, be as you are.

~ Papaji

All effort at controlling thoughts, appetites and desires
cannot but strengthen them along with the ego. What-
ever has to go must fall off by itself. All that you are
concerned with, all that you are, is the impersonal
functioning of understanding. So let that understanding
work through witnessing without judgment, knowing that
there is nothing else that you can do.

- Ramesh S. Balsekar

Belief, any belief, is based on the sense of
insecurity. Only when all belief is given
up are you free to know yourself. In self-
discovery what you find is the Truth - that
Truth which is total, self-evident and
which needs no outside support or justi-
fication.
- Ramesh S. Balsekar

One of the monks asked the great teacher
Abba Nistero:
"What should I do for the best in life?"
And the abba answered:
"All works are not equal.
The scripture says that Abraham was hospitable,
and God was with him;
it says Elias loved quiet,
and God was with him;
it says that David was humble,
and God was with him.
So, whatever path you find your soul longs after
in the quest for God,
do that, and always watch over your heart's integrity."

~ The Book of Mystical Chapters

The ego isn't wrong; it's just unconscious.
When you observe the ego in yourself,
you are beginning to go beyond it.
Don't take the ego too seriously.

~ Eckhart Tolle

Ask not of things to shed their veils.

Unveil yourself and things will be unveiled.


~ Mihkail Naimy

Well I define fundamentalism as the attempt to impose a
single 'truth' on a plural world. And what really lies behind it
is fear, a profound insecurity that makes you feel when you
meet someone who is not like you, or doesn't agree with you,
that that challenge is a threat against your very being.
Aggression is always a sign of insecurity. And insecurity is
always, at bottom, a lack of faith, not a presence of faith.

~ Rabbi Jonathan Sacks

Do not repeat after me words
that you do not understand.
Do not merely put on a mask
of my ideas, for it will be an
illusion and you will thereby
deceive yourself.

~ Krishnamurti

See everything
Overlook a great deal
Improve a little

~ Pope John XXIII

The creative members of an orthodoxy,
any orthodoxy, ultimately outgrow
their disciplines.

~ Irvin Yalom

And what if all of animated nature
Be but organic harps, diversely framed
That tremble into thought, as o'er them sweeps
Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze
At once the soul of each, and God of all

~ Coleridge

Let us not conjecture at random
about the greatest of things.

~ Heraclitus

People do not know how what is at
variance agrees with itself. It is an
attunement of opposite tensions,
like that of the bow and the lyre.

~ Heraclitus

What we see is not nature itself,
but nature exposed to our
particular method of questioning.

~ Heisenberg

For thousands of years, myths and legends have existed - a
popular wisdom, a camouflaged truth, a reality that kept us in
balance with the cosmos. As a result, our education was more
effective and not like it is nowadays, via books which fill
our brains but only our brains. So it is that the personality is
limited and rebellious, always constituting the real obstacle
to our advancement.

~ Nina Soncco

It is only when you realise that life is
taking you nowhere that it begins to
have meaning.

~ Ouspensky

The important thing is not to stop
questioning. Curiosity has its own
reason for existing.

~ Einstein

I must first of all know my own self, as the
Delphion inscription says; to be curious of
that which is not my concern, while I am
in ignorance of my own self, would be ridiculous.

~ Plato

The work of the spiritual teacher is like the work of Cupid. The work of Cupid is to bring two souls together; and so is the work of the spiritual teacher: to bring together the soul and God. But what is taught to the one who seeks after truth? Nothing is taught. He is only shown how he should learn from God. For no man can ever teach spirituality; it is God alone who teaches it.

~ Hazrat Inayat Khan

[The presence of evil] in his life provokes him into either overcoming it or yielding to it. If the first, it has led him to work for his own improvement; if the second, it has led him to acknowledge his own weakness. Sooner or later, the unpleasant consequences of such weakness will lead him to grapple with it and develop his power of will. That is part of the mission of evil, to stimulate him into its own destruction and to force him into his own betterment. Immediately and directly, it may either strengthen him or weaken him. Ultimately, it can only strengthen him.

~ Paul Brunton

No sound of clapping comes from only one hand. The thirsty man is moaning, "O delicious water!" The water is calling, "Where is the one who will drink me?" This thirst in our souls is the magnetism of the water: we are its and it is ours.

~ Rumi

Above all we have to go beyond words and images and concepts. No imaginative vision or conceptual framework is adequate to the great reality.

~ Bede Griffiths

Atheism and agnosticism signify the rejection of certain images and concepts of God or of truth, which are historically conditioned and therefore inadequate. Atheism is a challenge to religion to purifiy its images and concepts and come nearer to the truth of divine mystery.

~ Bede Griffiths

As you do not understand the world, and deal with it with this wrong understanding of it, the world will recoil upon you, and this recoiling is what is known as the effect of karma. While your dealings with the world may be called karma, the recoil of the world upon you is the effect of karma. The world will not rebound upon you if you deal with it with an understanding of its real nature. But you deal with it with a prejudiced notion in regard to it, and with a subtle desire to utilise it as an instrument in the satisfactions of your desires. We should not use the world as an instrument for our satisfaction. If we try to use it in this manner, the world will try to use us, also, as an instrument. It will give us tit for tat. As we behave with the world, so the world will behave with us.

~ Swami Krishnananda

So think as if your every thought
were to be etched in fire upon the sky
for all and everything to see.
For so, in truth, it is.

So speak as if the world entire
were but a single ear
intent on hearing what you say.
And so, in truth, it is.

So do as if your every deed
were to recoil upon your heads.
And so, in truth, it does.

So wish as if you were the wish.
And so, in truth, you are.

So live as if your God Himself
had need of you His life to live.
And so, in truth, He does.

~ Mikhail Naimy

Friends I tell you this: there is no Buddha, no spiritual path to follow, no training and no realisation. What are you so feverishly running after ? Putting a head on top of your own head, you blind idiots! Your head is right where it should be. Your trouble lies in your not believing in yourselves enough. Because you don’t believe in yourselves you are knocked here and there by all the conditions in which you find yourselves. Being enslaved and turned around by objective situations, you have no freedom whatever. You are not masters of yourselves. Stop turning to the outside and don’t be attached to my words either. Just cease clinging to the past and hankering after the future. This will be better than ten years pilgrimage.

~ Lin Chi

The one who asks the question is mistaken
The one who answers it is mistaken.

~ Buddha

One can always regain one’s innocence
if he acknowledges his suffering and his guilt
and suffers to the end
instead of trying to lay blame on others.

~ Herman Hesse

The law is simple.
Every experience is repeated
or suffered
till you experience it
properly and fully
the first time.

~ Ben Okri

Knowledge is chimera,
for beyond it ever lies
other knowledge,
and the incompleteness
of what is known
renders the knowing false.

~ Stephen Donaldson

Men forget where the way leads
and what they meet with every day
seems strange to them.
We should not act and speak
like men asleep.

~ Heraclitus

Trying to understand is like straining
to see through muddy water.
Be still, and allow the mud to settle.

~ Tao Te Ching

Our meddling intellect mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things - we murder to dissect.

~ Wordsworth

Whatever Jesus might have taught the crowds, his call to his own close disciples was always to practice dying - dying to one's life, dying to personal human relationships, dying to the whole world, dying to anything that did not pertain directly to the will of God. This was his baptism of spirit and fire. Not only for the crowds, but even for most of his disciples, his teaching was hard to bear. As has been said earlier, one needs to be prepared not only to understand the truth but also in order to withstand it.

~ Ravi Ravindra

Acceptance of what is immediately frees you
from mind identification and thus reconnects
you with Being. Resistance is the mind.

~ Eckhart Tolle