Great Throughts Treasury

"It is your moral duty to be happy."

"Just be honest with yourself. That opens the door."

"Learn to see things as they really are, not as we imagine they are."

"Keep always in front of you this simple and good news: With right inner"

"Knowledge of divine nature is possible only by entering and passing through the dark tunnel of human nature. Any other way leads to self-trickery and self-isolation."

"Let ordinary thinking come to an end, and extraordinary thinking will begin."

"Learning means to see the event so clearly that it cannot repeat itself."

"Life cannot make sense on the level of life."

"Light never battles darkness, so whenever you see a fight it is always between two dark forces."

"Life-victory arrives by desiring spiritual answers more than you desire exterior results."

"Like a thermometer people’s feelings rise or fall according to the social atmosphere. Never living from themselves, they remain at the mercy of exterior events. Everything outside tells them how to feel inside. They are slaves to bad news, or an angry look, or an unexpected change of plans. And, of course, the more a man is influenced by exterior events, the more he will angrily insist that no one tells him what to do. It is not necessary to live like a mindless thermometer. Any man can learn to live from himself."

"Little by little, step by step, see what happens to you as you deliberately abandon your rage and hostility."

"Live freshly every moment by seeing that mere thoughts about a past experience do not create a present reality."

"Make every appearance of discomfort your signal for winning insight into it."

"Man’s life on earth is what it is because he spends almost every moment of his life trying to cover up his anxieties instead of understanding and dissolving them."

"Living in the now is freedom from all problems connected with time. You ought to remember that sentence, you ought to memorize it, and ought to take it out, you ought to practice it, you ought to apply it. And most of all, you ought to rejoice in it because you have just heard how not to be wretched, miserable you anymore but to be a brand new, and forever brand new man or woman."

"Lose something before you get it and you will not fear losing it."

"Living from the outer to the inner; that means that you have roving eyes and alert ears to look out at the panorama of society and wonder and hope and contrive to try to get something from the outer that will satisfy the inner."

"More and more you become spiritually excited, for you are uncovering more and more secret rooms."

"Mental silence is the perfect response to a challenge."

"Mental sickness has set up a system by which it never loses. No matter what you do and no matter what the results are, you will win an ego-victory. That means that when you send your desires out into the world: 1. You will get what you want, or 2. You won’t get what you want. Of you get what you want, the pseudo-nature says, I have at last been given what I so richly deserve, and the sickness feels affirmed. If you don’t get what you want, you feel sorry for yourself. You still feel affirmed because you get a feeling, and that’s all that neurosis wants is a feeling."

"Most human beings live in suppressed energy, which sometimes releases itself like a steam engine."

"Man’s major social illusion is that he can build a society which is higher than his own psychological level."

"Mysticism is: a. An advanced state of inner enlightenment. b. Union with Reality. c. A state of genuinely satisfying success. d. Insight into an entirely new world of living. e. An intuitive grasp of Truth, above and beyond intellectual reasoning. f. A personal experience, in which we are happy and healthy human beings."

"Never accept the gloomy attitudes of unhappy people."

"Neurosis consciously met will eventually weaken and fall away."

"Never anchor yourself to anything, for only in detachment can you feel what you really want to feel."

"Mysticism is not this or that particular cup on the table; it is the water poured into all of them."

"Never let other people tell you who you are."

"Never try to turn failure into success; instead, try to turn your failure into understanding."

"No longer live as a winner or as a loser."

"No man is really interested in getting what he craves. He is really interested in being at peace with himself, but dosen’t know how."

"Never use the word love again until you know from yourself what it means."

"On a piece of paper write, “What I do when I am scared.” Then list numerically what you do. Keep it simple. Write down everything you remember. This includes all the centers: physical, mental, emotional and the sex center. For example: 1. I get tense, 2. I get anxious, 3. I get jealous, or 4. I retreat. The longer the list, the better work you are doing and the more you know about the machine. With that knowledge, something higher than the machine will repair it for you."

"On Monday you were cruel and on Tuesday you said you were sorry. But on Wednesday you did it again, which means I’m not going to believe anything you say on Thursday."

"One evidence of an empty life is that you are anxious."

"One false idea is that anyone can hurt you. Events can ruin your reputation, take your money, mistreat you, revenge itself upon you, deceive, betray, abandon you, but cannot hurt you."

"One man is the echo of the next man, both wrongly assuming they are original sources."

"No one can tell you what is right for you except yourself. So start telling yourself what to do. If you blunder for ten years while thinking for yourself, that is rich treasure when compared with living these ten years under the mental domination of another."

"Now, thought is both good and necessary for the mechanical process of life, like building a house or cooking dinner. But because your spiritual self is not mechanical it must be elevated by an entirely different power. That power is awareness."

"No one on earth can hurt you unless you accept the hurt in your own mind... The problem is not other people; it is your reaction."

"No one loves me? What has that to do with me?"

"Observe very carefully the next challenge and you will find that you try to do something about it. For heaven’s sake, leave it alone."

"One of man's most amazing self-deceptions is his pretense of having self-control while his life flies apart before his very eyes."

"One of our greatest enemies is secret resentment. Freedom begins as we become conscious of it."

"One value of self-observation and self-knowledge is to see who you are “not”."

"Only noise makes mistakes. Silence never makes mistakes."

"Our freedom can be measured by the number of things we can walk away from."

"People fight to preserve their frozen beliefs and then complain of the cold!"

"Persistence prevails, like a stream that is temporarily blocked by boulders and then collects force enough to overflow onward."