Insightful Quotes from the Self-Discovery home page.

Directory of Quotes:

Doubt Transports You

"Doubt transports you to the truth. Who does not doubt fails to inquire. Who does not inquire fails to gain insight. Without insight, you remain blind and perplexed."
Al-Ghazali, Sufi master (1058-1111)

The Appeal of Love

"The idealism of youthful love with its whisper of immortality fades, but the fortunate person finds a new direction for pursuit of the best that life has to offer. The appeal of love is the loss of the boundary that traps us in our conviction of individuality, of being a thing apart. This seeming separation also leaves us feeling threatened with being overwhelmed and subject to annihilation. It is the cocoon or egg of the undefined self."
See The Language of Love in the articles section of this site.

Watching

"Sometimes you can observe a lot by watching."
Yogi Berra

Comfort

"Comfort is the enemy of achievement."
Farrah Gray, who grew up in a single-parent family in the Chicago projects and became a millionaire at 14.

You Can Overcome It

"I've worn glasses since I was six years old," he said, "and of course, they called me four-eyes and a lot of other things, too. That's hard on a boy. It makes him lonely, and it gives him an inferiority complex, and he has a hard time overcoming it."
He paused a moment, still smiling, then said, "Of course, we didn't know what an inferiority complex was in those days. But you can overcome it. You've got to fight for everything you do. You've got to be above those calling you names, and you've got to do more work than they do, but it usually comes out all right in the end."
Harry Truman, in Merle Miller's Plain Speaking: An Oral Biography of Harry S. Truman

See Los Niños Héroes in the articles section of this site.

One Quality of Greatness

"There is one quality of greatness that a soldier appreciates perhaps more than any other, that is, the selfless willingness to be of service to others without thought of personal reward or danger."
George Marshall, in an address to the 80th anniversary of the Salvation Army, whose men and women Marshall admired for "their standards of loyalty and discipline and their simplicity and selfless devotion to duty."

George Catlett Marshall, Jr. (1880-1959) was an American military leader, Secretary of State, and the third Secretary of Defense. Once noted as the "organizer of victory" by Winston Churchill for his leadership of the Allied victory in World War II, Marshall supervised the U.S. Army during the war and was the chief military advisor to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. As Secretary of State he gave his name to the Marshall Plan, for which he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1953. ~ Wikipedia

See A Self-Effacing Man in the articles section of this site.

The Time Has Come to Stop Fooling Around

"Who am I; who are you? Why are we here? What is the purpose of life? Who or what is God? What is absolute reality?

"The time has come to stop fooling around. It's time to get the answer—not from someone else, not someone else's version of the answer—your own answer, arrived at yourself from the depth of your very own being.

"Here and now, you can begin this personal effort to determine just what Fact, Principle, Reality, Truth ITSELF is. In spite of all that mankind has been told for centuries, this is not an impossible task! It is not hard to do. It is not even an uphill struggle. It is the happiest thing you will ever undertake! As one divests himself of former beliefs and opinions and begins to arrive at his own concept of God, through his own effort, from out the wisdom of his own heart, then God, Reality, Truth reveals Itself to that one—just as it has been said, 'Seek and ye shall find.'

"Let the beliefs go. Let what 'they say' go. Drop all the old personal opinions no matter how near and dear they seem. You start anew, turning within to the heart. Then when you arrive at your own meaning of God, you happily find you are also discovering your own real Identity and its childlike simplicity."
William Samuel, 2 + 2 = Reality

Awake to the Life-Puzzle?

Are you a lonely puzzle-piece looking for your spot in the puzzle?
Or maybe a puzzle with an aching emptiness at the middle?
Is there a way to complete the puzzle with full satisfaction?

Jigsaw alarm clock: The puzzle pieces fire out from the clock at the set time. Wanna shut that dreaded noise off? Sorry, gotta complete the puzzle first.

True excellence takes sacrifice, mistakes, and enormous amounts of effort.
Rafe Esquith, Teach Like Your Hair's On Fire

Silent prayer or any other kind of meditation and contemplation without action in the world is like asking God to end our thirst without our drinking water.
William Samuel

It ain't the things we don't know that get us in trouble. It's the things we know that ain't so.
Artemus Ward

The lamps are different, but the Light is the same. So many garish lamps in the dying brain's lamp-shop. Forget about them.
Rumi

One must undergo all the anguish of mind that the flesh is heir to, in order to see the wants of others.
Joseph Sadony, from A Second Book of Crumbs from the Table

All lives are a struggle against selfishness.
John McCain, from Worth the Fighting For

Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.
Rumi

Leave it to Him. Surrender unreservedly. One of two things must be done. Either surrender because you admit your inability and also require a Higher Power to help you; or investigate into the cause of misery, go into the Source and merge into the Self. Either way you will be free from misery. God never forsakes one who has surrendered. Mamekam saranam vraja. [Take refuge in Me.]
Talks with Ramana Maharshi (no. 363)

I spent over thirty years journeying; you people were not even born when I found the way. If younger folk believe what I am talking about, you will step back each day, look at yourselves, and see all the way through.
Foyan (1067-1120), from Instant Zen: Waking Up in the Present, translated by Thomas Cleary

There are men of strange taste who seem to like the resultant gambler's world of complete uncertainty wherein nothing may be trusted and only illusions are left to feed the yearning for belief. But for all those of deeper religious need, the death of hope for certainty is the ultimate tragedy of absolute pessimism -- not the relative pessimism of a Buddha, a Christ, or a Schopenhauer, who each saw the hopeless darkness of this dark world as well as a Door leading to the undying Light, but rather a pessimism so deep that there is no hope for Light anywhere. Somewhere there must be certainty if the end of life is to be more than eternal despair. And to find this certainty something other than criticism is required.
Franklin Merrell-Wolff, from Philosophy of Consciousness Without an Object

I went on to discover that in its deepest sense, the will is not primarily the faculty of desire for anything known, but rather, the desire for something unknown, animate desire for something that lies beyond ourselves, a longing for something we know is missing in us....
Bernadette Roberts, from Contemplative: Autobiography of the Early Years

The only difference between us is that I am aware of my natural state, while you are bemused.... We discover it by being earnest, by searching, enquiring, questioning daily and hourly, by giving one's life to this discovery.
Nisargadatta

Let me remind you
That the perceived
Cannot perceive.
Huang Po

The only meditation is what you devise for yourself. The best meditation is just to look at yourself: "Why did I think this?" or "What should I do more dynamically tomorrow?"
Richard Rose, from Peace of Mind Despite Success talk (Akron, 1984)

I tell people to get to know themselves. Some people think this means what beginners observe, and consider it easy to understand. Reflect more carefully, in a more leisurely manner, what do you call your self?
Foyan (1067-1120) from Instant Zen: Waking Up in the Present, translated by Thomas Cleary

Part of the system I advise in The Albigen Papers is that we make milk from thorns. These very things which are negatives can be turned, the energy taken from them, and this energy can be used in progression -- in finding goals faster.
Richard Rose, from the Boston College lecture in The Direct-Mind Experience

If the consciousness is getting restless to know the Self, it will throw away everything and run to the goal.
Nisargadatta Maharaj

The practice of Zen has no secret, except standing on the verge of life and death.
Takeda Shingen, 16th Century Japanese warlord

John said: "Master, is there any material universe?"
Jesus answered: "No."
John asked: "Is there a material body?"
Jesus hesitated a long time and finally said: "Saints believed that their bodies were fashioned of clay and this believing brought them death."
Jesus said: "Let not him who seeketh cease from seeking until he hath found:
"... and when he hath found, he shall be amazed.
"... and when he hath been amazed, he shall reign.
"... and when he shall reign, he shall have rest.
"... the Kingdom of Heaven is within you and whoever shall know himself shall find it.
"... strive, therefore, to know yourselves and ye shall know that ye are in the City of God, and ye are the City."

This dialogue was said to have come from a manuscript found in Oxyrynchus in Egypt on the back side of a land-surveyor list of measurements. It appeared in the TAT Journal Vol. 2, No. 1 (issue 6) -- see the TAT Journal archive -- and was believed to reside in the British Museum, which apparently wasn't true. There were three papyrus fragments in Greek found during archeological excavations on the site of an ancient library at Oxyrhynchus in 1897-1903. The Nag Hammadi discovery in 1945 of a complete version of the lost "Gospel of Thomas" in Coptic made it possible to identify the fragments as coming from a Greek edition of Thomas. You can see the twenty sayings from those Oxyrynchus fragments on the gnosis.org site.

You have to steal your spirituality [from the appetites].
Richard Rose, Introduction to the Albigen System

Where the thinking path is exhausted
and the roots of life cease,
there the self becomes tranquil
and the time of life's fulfillment arrives.
Bassui

"How is it that we need all this prodding, all these warnings and earnest invitations and promises of infinite rewards, to persuade us to take a really close look at ourselves? Why don't all intelligent and serious people make it their chief business in life to find out whose life it is?" - Douglas Harding, "Self-Enquiry: Some Objections Answered," from Look for Yourself: The Science and Art of Self-Realization

Ramana Maharshi explained to Paul Brunton the advantage of self-enquiry, 'Mental quiet is easier to attain and earlier, but the goal is mental destruction. Most paths lead to the first, whereas self-enquiry leads to it quickly and then to the second.' In other words, other means may also lead to the subsidence of the mind, but it would rise again. For, they imply the retention of the mind as the instrument of practice, which would lead to its perpetuation. The ego [Note: RM used the terms ego, mind, and small-s self synonymously] may take different and subtler forms at different stages of one's practice but it is itself never destroyed."
Ramana Gita: Dialogues with Sri Ramana Maharshi

Wisdom tells me I'm Nothing.
Love tells me I'm Everything.
Between the two my life flows.
Nisargadatta

"I recommend for those not otherwise addicted, to embark upon a threefold path.... I would explain the mechanism as a sort of troika, the vehicle being the individual, and the three powers that are pulling the vehicle with proportionate pace are the Truth, the Law of the Contractor (brotherhood), and the Life of Search....

"I feel that a sincere seeker who possessed the determination to find the Truth at any cost, suffering, or expenditure of energy, would most certainly find the Truth, if he followed the threefold path with an open mind. The part of the path which is hardest to realize is that dealing with the brotherhood or school.... This latter requires compatibility with a group of people and requires that we find a group that is doing something worthwhile."

From The Albigen Papers by Richard Rose. Click here for the Threefold Path by Richard Rose.

Ouspensky: "Very well," I said, "tell me what you think of recurrence. Is there any truth in this, or none at all. What I mean is: Do we live only this once and then disappear, or does everything repeat and repeat itself, perhaps an endless number of times, only we do not remember it?"

Gurdjieff: "This idea of repetition," said G., "is not the full and absolute truth, but it is the nearest possible approximation of the truth. In this case truth cannot be expressed in words. But what you say is very near to it. And if you understand why I do not speak of this, you will be still nearer to it. What is the use of a man knowing about recurrence if he is not conscious of it and if he himself does not change?"

From In Search of the Miraculous by P.D. Ouspensky.

Clever Life is Short film clip. Requires Windows Media Player or equivalent software. Takes 5 - 10 minutes to download at modem speeds.

"Our mind has an amazing ability to split itself. The effect of this on the seeker of self-knowledge is to lead him about in endless circles of egos, never getting a true look at himself. 'The world is divided into people who think they are right' also applies to the world inside our heads." ~ Bob Fergeson's Mystic Missal Newsletter for February 2002.

NOW IS THE ACCEPTED TIME
From Towards Democracy by Edward Carpenter (1844-1929)

"Amid all the turmoil and the care - the worry, the fever, the anxiety,
The gloomy outlook, fears, forebodings,
The effort to keep up with the rush of supposed necessities, supposed duties,
The effort to catch the flying point of light, to reach the haven of Peace - always in the future -
Amid all, glides in the little word Now.

"As when the winds of March with their long brooms sweep the dead leaves from the surface of the ground, and the Earth in virgin beauty with the growing grass once more appears;
So when all this debris of thought from the Past, of anxiety about the Morrow, is at last swept away,
Does the vast ever-Present beneath reveal its perfect rondure."

"Consciousness, descending from above the field of subject-object knowledge, is distorted just as soon as it is forced into the relative form of expression. In the latter field, discursive formulation has finished its task when it has finally shown what non-relative Knowledge is not. It clears the ground so that no obstruction remains for entering the Darkness and Silence. But when the 'Voice of Silence' speaks into the relative world, the meaning lies between the words, as it were, rather than in the direct content of the words themselves.... We may say that the sequence of words is like the obverse side of an embroidered design. One must turn to the other side of the cloth to see the real figure...." ~ Franklin Merrell-Wolff, Experience and Philosophy

"Only a fool proclaims he is a spirit and a body. What we are is a body attempting to discover if it has a spirit." ~ Finding Balance by Shawn Nevins, in the November TAT Forum.

"I looked, as it were, over the world, asking: 'What is there of interest here? What is there worth doing?' I found but one interest: the desire that other souls should also realize this that I had realized, for in it lay the one effective key for the solving of their problems. The little tragedies of men left me indifferent. I saw one great Tragedy, the cause of all the rest, the failure of man to realize his own Divinity. I saw but one solution, the Realization of that Divinity." ~ Franklin Merrell-Wolff, Experience and Philosophy

"These tales of love are what moves me. The deaths do not impress me. It is the ever present theme of Love manifesting in human relationship and all life that I find overwhelmingly poignant." ~ The Recent Tragedy by Bob Cergol, in the October TAT Forum.

"All men are noble ... they just have to take the role that allows them to learn about love." ~ Adam, from "Tales of Love" by Richard Rose, in the September 2001 TAT Forum.

"These forms are like peep-holes, through which the Absolute gazes -- back into Itself." ~ Acceptance and Letting Go by Bob Cergol, in the August 2001 TAT Forum.

"Enlightenment: The stunning realization that you are eternal, and are no longer alive." ~ Definitions by Shawn Nevins, in the July 2001 TAT Forum.

[The Cathars of medieval France, who were exterminated as heretics by Crusaders and Inquisition, had the idea that] "the soul is 'not-created' and being a particle of divine substance, is exiled into a wicked world, prisoner of Matter and Time which have forced it to forget its true essence." - Michel Roquebert, The Cathar Religion (Editions Loubatieres). See The Voice of the Cathars in the June 2001 TAT Forum for a fascinating look at their story.

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