Browse The Living Book

The grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never dried all at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor is ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal dawn and gloaming, on sea and continents and islands, each in its turn as the round earth rolls. John Muir (1838)

Speech is mightier than all fighting. Ptah-hotep (2350 B.C.E.)

Lose your temper and you lose a friend; lie and you lose yourself. Hopi Adage

He who strikes terror into others is himself in continual fear. Claudian (370)

Don't think you can attain total awareness and whole enlightenment without proper discipline and practice.

This is egomania.

Appropriate rituals channel your emotions and energy toward the light. Without the discipline to practice them, you will tumble constantly backward into darkness.
Lao Tse (604 B.C.E.)

It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by the dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat. Theodore Roosevelt (1858)

I love them that love me;
and those that seek me
early shall find me.
Proverbs 8.17 (1011 B.C.E.)

There never was a time when I did not exist, nor you, nor any of these kings. Nor is there any future in which we shall cease to be. Bhaghavad-Gita (500 B.C.E.)

It's not to seek and find. It is simply to ask and wait. Byron Katie

Call forth in everyone only the remembrance of God, and of the Heaven that is in him. For where you would have your brother be, there will you think you are. Hear not his appeal to hell and littleness, but only his call for Heaven and greatness. Forget not that his call is yours, and answer him with me. (T-15.III.12:1-4) A Course In Miracles (1975)

We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience. Pierre Teilhard De Chardin (1881)

If we will be quiet and ready enough, we shall find compensation in every disappointment. Henry David Thoreau (1817)

Whoever knows himself knows God. Muhammed (570)

Meditation - the true action of a quiet mind - is not the path to the divine; it is the action of the divine reflecting upon itself. Guy Finley (1949)

There is no reaching the Self. If Self were to be reached it would mean that it is not here and now but that it is yet to be obtained. What is got afresh will also be lost. So it will be impermanent. What is not permanent is not worth striving for. So I say the Self is not reached. You are the Self; you are already That. Ramana Maharshi (1879)

And forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair. Kahlil Gibran (1883)

Turn back from the outer, set your eyes within. Jalal Al Din Rumi (1207)

Be the change you wish to see in the world. Mahatma Gandhi (1869)

In this moment of clarity, there never was a "before" or "after." To be what you are, you don't need time. Karl Renz (1953)

A wise man should consider that health is the greatest of human blessings, and learn how by his own thought to derive benefit from his illnesses. Hippocrates (460 B.C.E.)

It is peace, not happiness, that quells the fires of desire and leaves the heart truly content. Peace is the very essence of emotion and thought and yet beyond the touch of both. Frank Kinslow

There is an intuitive knowing within us that we are eternal but this gets covered over with the noise we create while identifying with the impermanent. Mooji (1954)

The most exquisite paradox . . . as soon as you give it all up, you can have it all. As long as you want power, you can't have it. The minute you don't want power, you'll have more than you ever dreamed possible. Ram Dass (1931)

If you come to a place of total helplessness, total powerlessness, don't resist. You might find something that up until then you have been missing. Mooji (1954)

What guarantee is there that the five senses, taken together, do cover the whole of possible existence? They cover simply our actual experience, our human knowledge of facts or events. There are gaps between the fingers; there are gaps between the senses. In these gaps is the darkness which hides the connection between things... this darkness is the source of our vague fear and anxiety, but also the home of the gods. They alone see the connections, the total relevance of everything that happens; that which now comes to us in bits and pieces, the accidents which exist only in our heads, in our limited perceptions. Idris Parry (1916)