Great Throughts Treasury

"Justice, being violated, destroys; justice, being preserved, preserves: therefore justice must not be violated, lest violated justice destroy us."

"Against an angry man let him not in return show anger, let him bless when he is cursed."

"Where women are honored, there the gods delight; where they are not honored, there all acts become fruitless."

"If the punishment does not fall on the offender himself, it falls on his sons; if not on the sons, on his grandsons."

"Depend not on another, but lean instead on thyself...True happiness is born of self-reliance."

"Once upon a time this (universe) was made of darkness, without anything that could be discerned, without any distinguishing marks, impossible to know through reasoning and understanding; it seemed to be entirely asleep. Then the Lord who is Self-existent, himself unmanifest, caused this (universe) to become manifest; putting his energy into the great elements and everything else, he became visible and dispelled the darkness. The one who can be grasped only by what is beyond the sensory powers, who is subtle, unmanifest, eternal, unimaginable, he of whom all creatures are made — he is the only who actually appeared. He thought deeply, for he wished to emit various sorts of creatures from his own body; first he emitted the waters, and then he emitted his semen in them. That (semen) became a golden egg, as bright as the sun with his thousand rays; Brahma himself, the grandfather of all people, was born in that (egg). ‘The waters are born of man,' so it is said; indeed, the waters are the children of the (primordial) man. And since they were his resting place in ancient time, therefore he is traditionally known as Narayana (‘resting on those born of man'). The one who is the first cause, unmanifest, eternal, the essence of what is real and unreal, emitted the Man, who is known in the world as Brahma. The Lord dwelt in that egg for a whole year, and then just by thinking he himself divided the egg into two. Out of the two fragments he made the sky and the earth, and the atmosphere in the middle, and the eight cardinal directions, and the eternal place of the waters. And out of himself he grew the mind-and-heart, the essence of what is real and unreal, and from the mind-and-heart came the sense of ‘I', the controlling consciousness of self,, and the great one which is the self, and all (material things that have) the three qualities, and, one by one, the five sensory powers that grasp the sensory objects."

"Justice is the only friend that follows men after death."