The higher your aims and vaster your desires, the more energy you will have for their fulfillment. Desire the good of all and the universe will work with you. But if you want your own pleasure, you must earn it the hard way. Before desiring, deserve.

~ Sri Nisargadatta

Plato located the soul of man in the head; Christ located it in the heart.

~ St Jerome

Idealism, though just in its premises, and often daring and honest in their application, is stultified by the exclusive intellectualism of its own methods: by its fatal trust in the squirrel-work of the industrious brain instead of the piercing vision of the desirous heart. It interests man, but does not involve him in its processes: does not catch him up to the new and more real life which it describes. Hence the thing that matters, the living thing, has somehow escaped it; and its observations bear the same relation to reality as the art of the anatomist does to the mystery of birth.

~ Evelyn Underhill

Each moment contains a hundred messages
from God: To every cry of "Oh Lord," He
answers a hundred times, "I am here."

~ Rumi

Finding the center of strength within ourselves is in the long run the best contribution we can make to our fellow men. ... One person with indigenous inner strength exercises a great calming effect on panic among people around him. This is what our society needs — not new ideas and inventions; important as these are, and not geniuses and supermen, but persons who can be, that is, persons who have a center of strength within themselves.

~ Rollo May

"Oh, if only it were possible to find understanding,” Joseph exclaimed. “If only there were a dogma to believe in. Everything is contradictory, everything tangential; there are no certainties anywhere. Everything can be interpreted one way and then again interpreted in the opposite sense. The whole of world history can be explained as development and progress and can also be seen as nothing but decadence and meaninglessness. Isn’t there any truth? Is there no real and valid doctrine?”

The master had never heard him speak so fervently. He walked on in silence for a little, then said: “There is truth, my boy. But the doctrine you desire, absolute, perfect dogma that alone provides wisdom, does not exist. Nor should you long for a perfect doctrine, my friend. Rather, you should long for the perfection of yourself. The deity is within you, not in ideas and books. Truth is lived, not taught. Be prepared for conflicts, Joseph Knecht - I can see that they already have begun.

~ Hermann Hesse (The Glass Bead Game)

Certainly it is correct to say: Conscience is the voice of God.

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

Make sure that your religion is a matter between you and God only.

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

Self-righteous morality is not a means for experiencing higher consciousness. Higher consciousness, spontaneously leads to moral and ethical behavior.

~ Deepak Chopra

All desires are bad, but some are worse than others.
Pursue any desire, it will always give you trouble.
Why desire at all? Desiring a state of freedom from
desire will not set you free. Nothing can set you
free, because you are free. See yourself with
desireless clarity, that is all.

~ Nisargadatta Maharaj

The only offering you can make to God
is your increasing awareness.

~ Lalla

All that we read and think does not get assimilated into the feeling of the heart. That is why a post-graduate scholar who is dead is not reborn with the same amount of knowledge. That which has gone deep into the heart becomes a part of our life. The rest is only a wind that blows over the surface of our minds.

~ Swami Krishnananda

Narayana and Nara meditate together and are inseparables; which means that God and man coalesce in every action and form a union in which karma becomes Karma Yoga, and that spiritual meditation is not merely a human effort but involves Divine interference. Though we may lift our arms to touch a magnetic field, when once we raise it near it is pulled by the force of the field, and here our effort ceases and we are under the influence of another power altogether.

~ Swami Krishnananda

You are alone with your God, and there is no one around you. This is the truth. Rest your mind on this, and attain peace.

~ Swami Krishnananda

When we get irritated or annoyed in the midst of work, for any reason, it is to be taken as a caution that our personality has entered into it, and the ‘unselfishness’ of the work has been adulterated with that undesirable and vitiating factor, the ego. When the work is ‘not mine’, there is no reason for internal disturbance.

~ Swami Krishnananda

If you want it [realization], it will come. There is no qualification necessary, except wanting it. That is the only qualification. If it is not wanted, it will not come. It comes when it is wanted, but wanted wholly, not a little.

~ Swami Krishnananda

Truth is the capacity to visualise things as they are in themselves, and untruth is that which obstructs this vision.

~ Swami Krishnananda

To attach oneself to a guru, an avatar, one religion, one creed, is to see the stars only. To put one's faith in the Infinite Being and in its presence within the heart, is to see the vast empty sky itself. The stars will come and go, will disintegrate and vanish, but the sky remains.

~ Paul Brunton

[Notebooks Category 28: The Alone > Chapter 2: Our Relation To the Absolute> # 104]

When we are empty of ego we, too, can carry on in calm acceptance of life's varying events. When we cease making prejudicial distinctions - gentle or harsh, beautiful or ugly, good or bad - a peaceful stillness will permeate our mind. If there is no ego, there is no agitation.

~ Master Han Shan

Although the pure truth has never been stated, nevertheless it has never been lost. Its existence does not depend upon human statement but upon human sensitivity. In this it is unlike all other knowledge.

~ Paul Brunton

[Notebooks Category 20: What Is Philosophy? > Chapter 5: The Philosopher ># 191]

The shell must be cracked apart if what is in it is to come out, for if you want the kernel you must break the shell. And therefore, if you want to discover nature's nakedness, you must destroy its symbols, and the farther you get in the nearer you come to its essence. When you come to the One that gathers all things up into itself, there your soul must stay.

~ Meister Eckhart

Above all, be at ease, be as natural and spacious as possible. Slip quietly out of the noose of your habitual anxious self, release all grasping, and relax into your true nature. Think of your ordinary emotional, thought-ridden self as a block of ice or a slab of butter left out in the sun. If you are feeling hard and cold, let this aggression melt away in the sunlight of your meditation. Let peace work on you and enable you to gather your scattered mind into the mindfulness of Calm Abiding, and awaken in you the awareness and insight of Clear Seeing. And you will find all your negativity disarmed, your aggression dissolved, and your confusion evaporating slowly like mist into the vast and stainless sky of your absolute nature.

~ Sogyal Rinpoche

[The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying]

When all the Buddhas manifest themselves in the world, they proclaim nothing but the One Mind.

~ Huang-Po

A perception, sudden as blinking, that subject and object are one, will lead to a deeply mysterious understanding; and by this understanding you will awaken to the truth.

~ Huang-Po

The philosophic outlook rises above all sectarian controversy. It finds its
own position not only by appreciating and synthesizing what is solidly based
in the rival sects but also by capping them all with the keystone of
nonduality.

~ Paul Brunton

[Notebooks Category 20: What Is Philosophy? > Chapter 1: Toward Defining
Philosophy > # 471]

Pass beyond form, escape from names!
Flee titles and names toward meaning!

~ Rumi

Truth is not a reward for good behaviour, nor a prize for passing some tests. It cannot be brought about. It is the primary, the unborn, the ancient source of all that is. You are eligible because you are. You need not merit truth. It is your own....Stand still, be quiet.

~ Nisargadatta Maharaj

In the strictest sense, we cannot actually think about life and reality at all, because this would have to include thinking about thinking, thinking about thinking about thinking, and so *ad infinitum*. One can only attempt a rational, descriptive philosophy of the universe on the assumption that one is totally separate from it. But if you and your thoughts are part of this universe, you cannot stand outside them to describe them. This is why all philosophical and theological systems must ultimately fall apart. To 'know' reality you cannot stand outside and define it; you must enter into it, be it, and feel it.

~ Alan Watts

Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers.

~ Voltaire

Whoever wants the "I" to yield up its mysterious and tremendous secret must stop it from looking perpetually in the mirror, must stop the little ego's fascination with its own image.

~ Paul Brunton

[Notebooks> Category 8: The Ego > Chapter 2: I-thought: 17]

Truth can be stated in a thousand different ways, yet each one can be true.

~ Swami Vivekananda

Comfort is no test of truth. Truth is often far from being comfortable.

~ Swami Vivekananda

Like everything mental, the so-called law of causation contradicts itself. No thing in existence has a particular cause; the entire universe contributes to the existence of even the smallest thing; nothing could be as it is without the universe being what it is. When the source and ground of everything is the only cause of everything, to speak of causality as a universal law is wrong. The universe is not bound by its content, because its potentialities are infinite; besides it is a manifestation, or expression of a principle fundamentally and totally free.

~ Nisargadatta

Take someone who doesn't keep score,
who's not looking to be richer,
or afraid of losing,
who has not the slightest interest even
in his own personality: He's free.

~ Rumi

Everything is new now for me.
My mind is new, the moon, the sun.
The whole world looks rinsed with water,
washed in the rain of I am That.
Lalla leaps and dances inside the energy
that creates and sustains the universe.

~ Lalla

The source of wisdom and power, of love and beauty, is within ourselves, but not within our egos. It is within our consciousness. Indeed, its presence provides us with a conscious contrast which enables us to speak of the ego as if it were something different and apart: it is the true Self whereas the ego is only an illusion of the mind.

~ Paul Brunton

[Notebooks Category 8: The Ego > Chapter 1: What Am I? > # 2]

God has revealed to me that only the Paramatman, whom the Vedas describe as the Pure Soul, is as immutable as Mount Sumeru, unattached, and beyond pain and pleasure. There is much confusion in this world of His maya. One can by no means say that 'this' will come after 'that' or 'this' will produce 'that'.

~ Sri Ramakrishna

Prayer can draw in grace by a spiritual attunement of one's being in the intensity of feeling, which is the motive power behind prayer. Feelings that rise from the deepest recesses of one's heart can produce immediate results, because of their proximity to reality.

~ Swami Krishnananda

We do not know how much we have done before and how much we have to suffer to undo those deeds but the karmic law knows it. Sometimes, to us, it may seem to be terrible suffering; still, we should accept and undergo that suffering. There is no intention to destroy a person by giving him or her more hardship. The intention is to purify the person, so the suffering and the hardship come according to the capacity of the individual. If you face it with all courage, even the suffering becomes very mild. It is up to you. In fact, pain becomes stronger or milder according to how one faces it.

~ Swami Satchidananda

Look for the mysterious in life. Wherever you look – in the white clouds, in the stars in the night, in the flowers, in a flowing river – wherever you look, look for the mystery. And whenever you find that a mystery is there, meditate on it. Meditation means: dissolve yourself before that mystery, annihilate yourself before that mystery, disperse yourself before that mystery. Be no more, and let the mystery be so total that you are absorbed in it. And suddenly a new door opens, a new perception is achieved.

~ Osho