Great Throughts Treasury

"There is much, of course, in the exclusive claims of Christianity which make it hostile to other faiths."

"There can be no wise politics without thought beforehand."

"They who cannot face the world have not the strength to face the difficulties of Yoga practice. If the outer world out-wearies your powers, how do you expect to conquer the difficulties of the inner life? If you cannot climb over the little troubles of the world, how can you hope to climb over the difficulties that a yogi has to scale? Those men blunder, who think that running away from the world is the road to victory, and that peace can be found only in certain localities."

"There is a charm in making a stew, to the unaccustomed cook, from the excitement of wondering what the result will be, and whether any flavour save that of onions will survive the competition in the mixture."

"There is far more misunderstanding of Islam than there is, I think, of the other religions of the world. So many things are said of it by those who do not belong to that faith."

"There is no life without consciousness; there is no consciousness without life."

"There is no birthright in the white skin that it shall say that wherever it goes, to any nation, amongst any people, there the people of the country shall give way before it, and those to whom the land belongs shall bow down and become its servants."

"There was a time when any idea of voluntary limitation was regarded by pious people as interfering with Providence. We are beyond that now, and have become capable of recognizing that Providence works through the common sense of individual brains."

"This world is full of forms that are illusory, and the values are all wrong, the proportions are out of focus. The things which a man of the world thinks valuable, a spiritual man must cast aside as worthless."

"Thought creates character."

"This coarse and insulting way of regarding woman, as though they existed merely to be the safety-valves of men's passions, and that the best men were above the temptation of loving them, has been the source of unnumbered evils."

"This Old Testament - containing error, folly, absurdity and immorality - is by English statute law declared to be of divine authority, a blasphemy - if there were anyone to be blasphemed - blacker and more insolent than any word ever written or penned by the most hotheaded Freethinker."

"Those who can serve best, those who help most, those who sacrifice most, those are the people who will be loved in life and honored in death, when all questions of color are swept away and when in a free country free citizens shall meet on equal grounds."

"To look at food and say that it is good will not satisfy a starving man; he must put forth his hand and eat. So to hear the Master?s words is not enough; you must do what He says, attending to every word, taking every hint."

"Thought is just not something objective in our heads. Thought is power ? real, objective power. Moreover, the thoughts we create have a life of their own. They have a kind of material reality that affects other people for good or ill ? hence our responsibility to chose."

"To me in my childhood, elves and fairies of all sorts were very real things, and my dolls were as really children as I was myself a child."

"To see, to know, to understand, even though the seeing blind, though the knowledge sadden, though the understanding shatter the dearest hopes?such has ever been the craving of the upward-striving mind in man."

"To see the Logos, the principle of consciousness, crucified on the cross of time and space in our own selves is not an evasion but among the most profound insights a human being can have."

"Until evil is deliberately put away by a full effort of the will and a resolute unwavering determination, the very beginning of the finding of the Self may not be. The feet which tread the miry ways of sin may not place themselves upon the path of Holiness."

"We shower money on generals and on nobles, we keep high-born paupers living on the national charity, we squander wealth with both hands on army and navy, on churches and palaces; but we grudge every halfpenny that increases the education rate and howl down every proposal to build decent houses for the poor. We cover our heartlessness and indifference with fine phrases about sapping the independence of the poor and destroying their self-respect."

"We were an ill-matched pair, my husband and I, from the very outset; he, with very high ideas of a husband's authority and a wife's submission, holding strongly to the 'master-in-my-own-house theory,' thinking much of the details of home arrangements, precise, methodical, easily angered and with difficulty appeased."

"What is the essence of theosophy? It is the fact that man, being himself divine, can know the divinity whose life he shares. As an inevitable corollary to this supreme truth comes the fact of the brotherhood of man."

"We have no right to pick out all that is noblest and fairest in man, to project these qualities into space, and to call them God. We only thus create an ideal figure, a purified, ennobled, 'magnified' Man."

"We learn much during our sleep, and the knowledge thus gained slowly filters into the physical brain, and is occasionally impressed upon it as a vivid and illuminative dream."

"What is a philosophy? It Is an answer satisfactory to the reason to all the great problems of life. That is what is meant by philosophy. It must satisfy the reason, and it must show the unity underlying the endless diversity of the facts that science observes."

"What is the constitution of the universe? The universe is the manifestation of the divine thought; the thought of God embodies itself in the thought-forms that we call worlds."

"What Religion has to face in the controversies of to-day is not the unbelief of the sty, but the unbelief of the educated conscience and of the soaring intellect."

"When a man feels devotion to the Supreme, he has turned his back on evil and has turned his face to the goal; he may stumble, stray, even fall, but his face is turned in the right direction, he is going homewards; he must needs become dutiful by the force of his devotion."

"What, after all, is the object of education? To train the body in health, vigor and grace, so that it may express the emotions in beauty and the mind with accuracy and strength."

"When we recognize that unity of all living things, then at once arises the question - how can we support this life of ours with least injury to the lives around us; how can we prevent our own life adding to the suffering of the world in which we live?"

"Where love rules, laws are not needed."

"Yet that is the most splendid privilege of man, that the true birthright of the human Spirit, to know his own Divinity, and then to realise it, to know his own Divinity and then to manifest it."

"When we realize our oneness with our RULER, then the matter shall have no longer power over us, and we shall see it as the unreality it is."

"When a man, a woman, see their little daily tasks as integral portions of the one great work, they are no longer drudges but co-workers with God."

"You should always take a religion at its best and not at its worst, from its highest teachings and not from the lowest practices of some of its adherents."

"Yoga is a science, and not a vague dreamy drifting or imagining. It is an applied science, a systematized collection of laws applied to bring about a definite end. It takes up the laws of psychology, applicable to the unfolding of the whole consciousness of man on every plane, in every world, and applies those rationally in a particular case. This rational application of the laws of unfolding consciousness acts exactly on the same principles that you see applied around you every day in other departments of science."

"Yoga is a matter of the Spirit and not of the intellect. For just as water will find its way through every obstruction, in order to rise to the level of its source, so does the spirit in man strive upwards ever towards the source whence it came."