Great Throughts Treasury

"Detection of inner negativity is not a negative act. But a courageously positive act that makes you a new person."

"How would you feel if you had no fear? Feel like that. How would you behave toward other people if you realized their powerlessness to hurt you? Behave like that. How would your react to so-called misfortune if you saw its inability to bother you? React like that. How would you think toward yourself if you knew you were really all right? Think like that."

"A confused mind calls itself a clear mind, and that explains the entire human horror story."

"A hoax is being played on me. What is it?"

"A clear understanding of negative emotions dismisses them."

"A perfect method for awakening is to examine the results of our daily actions. If they are harmful, we know we need more consciousness."

"A man understands why his life unfolds as it does by understanding the operations of his own nature."

"A man’s day is purposeless when he spends it in unconscious nourishment of neurosis."

"A cheery relaxation is man’s natural state, just as nature itself is relaxed. A waterfall is concerned only with being itself, not with doing something it considers waterfall-like."

"A man's failure to question the ideas by which he lives keeps his life as it is."

"A rescuing idea is one that disagrees with your habitual nature but which agrees with Truth."

"A sincere seeker constantly acquires self-insight, crisis or not."

"A truly strong person does not need the approval of others any more than a lion needs the approval of sheep."

"A sour apple tree deceives only those who admire the blossoms without tasting the fruit."

"A person obsessed with the need to be happy will never be so. The obsession is the obstruction. He does not really seek happiness, rather he seeks for a condition which matches his personal idea regarding the nature of happiness. But happiness is not a mere idea, for one idea will always have competition from another idea. This is why the unhappy man chases forever from one attraction to another. Happiness will come when he stops chasing, that is, when he stops thinking that an idea about happiness is the same as happiness. A man enjoying the sunshine does so without analyzing it."

"All your problems, yes all of them, have a parent problem."

"Aloneness is a wise teacher. Kierkegaard remarked that one sign of spiritual maturity was the ability to be comfortable when alone."

"Always stay on the path of seeing what is wrong, then you will see what is right."

"Admiration is a terrible thing. It is division. The idea stands between you and the good life."

"All good things come to anyone who refuses to be intimidated by his own despair."

"All heartache is caused by wrong viewpoints."

"All forms of self-defeating behavior are unseen and unconscious, which is why their existence is denied."

"All troubled people, which is all people, must if they are going to be delivered from themselves, must make the concession that there is a force, an entity, a power that is higher than their own present nature."

"All we have to do is to receive what we are given...We are given the naturalness to love someone, to be calm in crisis, to ignore self-defeating suggestions, to be pleasant, forgiving, tender, helpful, unworried, brave, energetic."

"All you need to be is a simple, good, decent human being."

"An outlaw to Truth is an in-law to pain."

"An anxious young fish swam over to ask his father, I have heard of the ocean, but cannot find it. What and where is the ocean? His father replied, Stop distracting yourself with worry about the ocean and you will find it. We are in truth, already One with the universe and with ourselves, but an anxious mind prevents self-realization."

"An awakened man has no enemies; even if he has enemies."

"Anger, whether suppressed or expressed, always tells lies."

"An obvious fact about negative feelings is often overlooked. They are caused by us not by exterior happenings. An outside event presents the challenge but we react to it. So we must attend to the way we take things not to the things themselves."

"And that one problem is that you are separated from God."

"Always walk through life as if you have something new to learn, and you will."

"And the next day you have to plan it out again."

"Anyone weary of stumbling in the dark has taken the first step toward walking in the Light."

"Any unpleasant fact about yourself you can bear to face can be eliminated as a fact about yourself. Any unpleasant fact about yourself you cannot bear to face will continue to be a fact about yourself."

"Anytime you are unhappy, instantly realize it is a wrong thought which is unhappy, not the essential you."

"Anything that does not lead you higher is lifeless."

"As long as you want to be you; that is all there is for you."

"Ask spiritual questions with intense integrity, and inspiring answers will surely arrive."

"Avoid nothing. Go through everything."

"Astonishingly, if you will have absolutely nothing to do with suffering, suffering will have nothing to do with you."

"Awareness breaks thought. You can’t be thinking when you are aware."

"Authentic self-command is a natural result of self-knowledge. Whoever knows himself commands himself, and does so effortlessly."

"Awareness is knowing that you don’t know what you are doing."

"Badness is an admission of failure. Think about this all day."

"Be very observant of self-harm in you the moment it occurs."

"Be true to your original nature and you make every circumstance a right circumstance as far as you are concerned."

"Being separate from God is the reason you have all the other problems."

"Beauty is only skin deep, but it’s a valuable asset if you’re poor or haven’t any sense."

"Bitterness is the outcome of a wrong mental movement - the attempt to force external events to conform to internal fantasy. The cure is to see fantasy as fantasy, which will reveal it as neither necessary nor rewarding."