The soul should always stand ajar, ready to welcome the ecstatic experience.
We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical means, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn.
Nothing ever comes to an end. Wherever one has sunk roots that emanate from one’s best or truest self, one will always find a home.
Each of us must make his own true way, and when we do, that way will express the universal way.
If you are doing something you would do for nothing then you are on your way to salvation. And if you could drop it in a minute and forget the outcome, you are even further along. And if while you are doing it you are transported into another existence, there is no need for you to worry about the future.
The heat inside the human body grows, it does not know where to throw itself — for a while it knots into will, heavy, burning, sweet, then into generosity, that longs to take on the burdens of others, then into mad love that lasts forever.
. . . Consciously, or unconsciously, the human being seeks to find a material form for the new value which lives in him in spiritual form. That is the searching of the spiritual value for materialization. Matter is here a storeroom and from it the spirit chooses what is specifically necessary for it — just as the cook would. That is the positive, the creative. That is the good. The white, fertilizing ray. This white ray leads to evolution, to elevation. Thus behind matter the creative spirit is concealed within matter.
In the miraculous spontaneity of the sun, there is discipline that utterly escapes you, and a knowledge beyond any that we know. And in the spontaneous playing of the bees from flower to flower, there is a discipline beyond any that you know, and laws that follow their own knowledge and joy that is beyond command. For true discipline, you see, is found only in spontaneity.
Let mystery have its place in you; do not be always turning up your whole ploughshare of self-examination, but leave a little fallow corner in your heart ready for any seed the wind my bring, and reserve a nook of shadow for the passing bird; keep a place in your heart for the unexpected guest, an altar for the unknown God.
If I speak with the eloquence of men and of angels, but have no love, I become no more than blaring brass or crashing cymbal. If I have the gift of foretelling the future and hold in my hand not only all human knowledge but the very secrets of God, and if I also have that absolute faith which can move mountains, but have no love, I amount to nothing at all. If I dispose of all that I possess, yes even if I give my own body to be burned, but have no love, I achieve precisely nothing.
This love of which I speak is slow to lose patience — it looks for a way of being constructive. It is not possessive; it is neither anxious to impress nor does it cherish inflated ideas of its own importance.
Love knows no limit to its endurance, no end to its trust, no fading of its hope; it can outlast anything. It is, in fact, the one thing that still stands when all else has fallen.
He who would know the world, seek first within his being’s depths; he who would truly know himself, develop interest in the world.
