All dependence on another is futile, for what others can give others will take away. Only what is your own at the start will remain your own in the end. Accept no guidance but from within, and even then sift out all memories for they will mislead you. Even if you are quite ignorant of the ways and the means, keep quiet and look within; guidance is sure to come. You are never left without knowing what your next step should be. The trouble is that you may shirk it. The Guru is there for giving you courage because of his experience and success. But only what you discover through your own awareness, your own effort, will be of permanent use to you. Remember, nothing you perceive is your own. Nothing of value can come to you from outside; it is only your own feeling and understanding that are relevant and revealing. Words, heard or read, will only create images in your mind, but you are not a mental image. You are the power of perception and action behind and beyond the image.

~ Sri Nisargadatta

[I am That - Chapter 98]

The ego totally ceases to exist and is fully absorbed into the Overself only in special, temporary, and trance-like states. At all other times, and certainly at all ordinary active and everyday times, it continues to exist.The failure to learn and understand this important point always causes much confusion in mystical circles. The state arrived at in deep meditation is one thing; the state returned to after such meditation is another. The ego vanishes in one but reappears in the other. But there are certain after-effects of this experience upon it which bring about by degrees a shift in its relation to the Overself. It submits, obeys, expresses, and reflects the Overself.

~ Paul Brunton

[Notebooks Category 8: The Ego > Chapter 1: What Am I? > # 213]

Make no mistake about it--enlightenment is a destructive process. It has nothing to do with becoming better or being happier. Enlightenment is the crumbling away of untruth. It's see through the facade of pretense. It's the complete eradication of everything we imagine to be true.

~ Adyashanti

Whoever has dealings with others cannot afford to ignore the double nature
of human nature. Failure to recognize it leads to confusing consequences.
Looking neither for the good alone nor for the bad alone, but remaining
emotionally detached during such an act of recognition, is a philosophical
attribute. He who possesses it may hold no illusion about the mixed motives
in others and yet still practise goodwill toward them. This must be so, for
the primal source of all Goodness inspires him daily and constantly to hold
to this practice.

~ Paul Brunton

[Notebooks Category 13: Human Experience > Chapter 2: Living in The World >
# 408]

If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.

~ Francis Bacon

The internal suffering of the person who does not reciprocate the criticism and abuse hurled at him burns down the abuser taking away all the latter's merit.

~ Mahabharata

[Adiparva 87.7]

Life only demands from you the strength you possess. Only one feat is possible — not to have run away.

~ Dag Hammarskjold

Never, "for the sake of peace and quiet," deny your own experience or convictions.

~ Dag Hammarskjold

Dharma protects those who protect it.

~ Mahabharata

[Vana Parva 313.128]

there comes a time
when you have to let go
all the words
all the teaching
and trust the infinite

~ Billy Doyle

We carry about us the burden of what thousands of people have said and the memories of all our misfortunes. To abandon all that is to be alone, and the mind that is alone is not only innocent but young -- not in time or age, but young, innocent, alive at whatever age -- and only such a mind can see that which is truth and that which is not measurable by words.

~ Krishnamurti

What the soul sees and has experienced, that it knows; the rest is appearance, prejudice and opinion.

~ Sri Aurobindo

And looks commercing with the skies,
Thy rapt soul sitting in thine eyes.

~ John Milton

Do not try to keep quiet, do not make being quiet into a task to be performed. Don't be restless about being quiet, miserable about being happy.

~ Nisargadatta Maharaj

For whoever seeks God in some special way,
will gain the way and lose God who is hidden in the way.
But whoever seeks God without any special way,
finds Him as He really is...He is Life itself.

~ Meister Eckhart

Blessed be you, mighty matter, irresistible march of evolution, reality ever newborn; you who, by constantly shattering our mental categories, force us to go ever further and further in our pursuit of the truth.

~ Teilhard de Chardin

So many things which once had distressed or revolted him — the speeches and pronouncements of the learned, their assertions and their prohibitions, their refusal to allow the universe to move — all seemed to him now merely ridiculous, non-existent, compared with the majestic reality, the flood of energy, which now revealed itself to him: omnipresent, unalterable in its truth, relentless in its development, untouchable in its serenity, maternal and unfailing in its protectiveness.

~ Teilhard de Chardin

The world’s ways are mysterious. There is something good in all seeming failures. You are not able to see this now. Time will reveal it. Be Patient.

~ Swami Sivananda

All men must see that the teaching of religion by rules and rote is largely a hoax. The proper teaching is recognized with ease. You can know it without fail because it awakens within you that sensation which tells you this is something you've always known.

~ Frank Herbert

Symbols endure when their meaning is lost.

~ Frank Herbert

I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

~ Frank Herbert

A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it.

~ Frank Herbert

Study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in.

~ Leonardo da Vinci

Taking no theoretical position, not committed to any beliefs, not wearing any labels, not putting himself in any categories, the philosophical student starts his search for truth in intellectual freedom and ends it in personal inner freedom. He is then what he is.

~ Paul Brunton

A little thinking may incline the mind toward atheism, but greatness of study brings the mind back again to God.

~ Francis Bacon

All I can say is "I am", all else is inference. But the inference has become a habit. Destroy all habits of thinking and sleeping. The sense "I am" is a manifestation of a deeper cause, which you may call self, God, Reality or by any other name. The "I am" is in the world but it is the key which can open the door out of the world.

~ Nisargadatta

When Thales was asked what was difficult, he said, "To know one's self." And what was easy, "To advise another."

~ Diogenes Laertius

It is necessary to the happiness of man that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving, it consists in professing to believe what one does not believe.

~ Thomas Paine

Too late I came to you, O beauty both so ancient and so fresh, too late I came to love you. And behold, you were within me and I was out of myself, and there I was searching for you.

~ St Augustine

Experience, however sublime, is not the real thing. By its very nature it comes and goes. Self-realization is not an acquisition. It is more of the nature of understanding. Once arrived at, it cannot be lost.

~ Nisargadatta

We grow through investigation, and to investigate we need experience. We tend to repeat what we have not understood. If we are sensitive and intelligent, we need not suffer. Pain is a call for attention and the penalty of carelessness. Intelligent and compassionate action is the only remedy.

~ Nisargadatta

You are the truth
from foot to brow.
Now, what else
would you like to know?

~ Rumi

Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves, but deal in our privacy with the last honesty and truth.

~ Emerson

What Brahman is cannot be described. All things in the world — the Vedas, the Puranas, the Tantras, the six systems of philosophy — have been defiled, like food that has been touched by the tongue, for they have been read or uttered by the tongue. Only one thing has not been defiled in this way, and that is Brahman. No one has ever been able to say what Brahman is.

~ Sri Ramakrishna

The feeling, 'I am He', is not wholesome. A man who entertains such an idea, while looking on his body as the Self, causes himself great harm. He cannot go forward in spiritual life; he drags himself down. He deceives himself as well as others. He cannot understand his own state of mind.

~ Sri Ramakrishna

Integrity has no need of rules.

~ Albert Camus

Sit on the summit of a thousand mountains without leaving the crossroads.

~ The Secret of the Golden Flower

Whatever is contrary to the Tao will not last long.

~ Lao Tzu

Mind can know only that which is of the same nature as itself, namely, thought.

~ Paul Brunton

What we have forgotten is that thoughts and words are conventions, and that it is fatal to take conventions too seriously. A convention is a social convenience, as, for example, money ... but it is absurd to take money too seriously, to confuse it with real wealth ... In somewhat the same way, thoughts, ideas and words are "coins" for real things.

~ Alan Watts