Great Throughts Treasury

"All the arts we practice are apprenticeship. The big art is our life."

"Poetry often enters through the window of irrelevance."

"It is for each of us freely to choose whom we shall serve, and find in that obedience our freedom."

"Am I willing to give up what I have in order to be what I am not yet? Am I able to follow the spirit of love into the desert? It is a frightening and sacred moment. There is no return. One's life is charged forever. It is the fire that gives us our shape."

"It helps, I think, to consider ourselves on a very long journey; the main thing is to keep to the faith, to endure, to help each other when we stumble or tire, to weep and press on."

"It is part of our pedagogy to teach the operations of thinking, feeling, and willing so that they may be made conscious. For if we do not know the difference between an emotion and a thought, we will know very little. We need to understand the components (of emotions) at work... in order to free their hold."

"We must be steady enough in ourselves, to be open and to let the winds of life blow through us, to be our breath, our inspiration; to breathe with them, mobile and soft in the limberness of our bodies, in our agility, our ability, as it were, to dance, and yet to stand upright."

"The imagination equips us to perceive reality when it is not fully materialized."

"Let no one be deluded that a knowledge of the path can substitute for putting one foot in front of the other."