Knowledge is essential to conquest; only according to our ignorance are we helpless. Thought creates character. Character can dominate conditions. Will creates circumstances and environment.
Death is but an aspect of life, and the destruction of one material form is but a prelude to building up of another.
The misery we inflict on sentient beings slackens our human evolution.
Nature is always lavish of her gifts even to the most insignificant forms. The butterflies and moths are richly dowered in this respect.
The Atheist waits for proof of God. Till that proof comes he remains, as his name implies, without God. His mind is open to every new truth, after it has passed the warder Reason at the gate.
Yoga is a science, and not a vague dreamy drifting or imagining.
No circumstances can ever make or mar the unfolding of the spiritual life. Spirituality does not depend upon the environment; it depends upon one’s attitude towards life.
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.
Just as the sun in the heaven is unchanged, but is mirrored as a thousand suns in ponds, lakes, rivers, and oceans, so do you know the Sun of the Spirit within you from the broken reflections that you find in the lower self.
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.
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.
Mysticism is the most scientific form of religion, for it bases itself, as does all science, on experience and experiment – experiment being only a specialised form of experience, devised either to discover or to verify.
My deeds must speak for me, for words are too poor.
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.
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.
The peril was pressing; the menace unmistakable. The.
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;.
Religions are branches from a common trunk – Divine Wisdom.
Even the outer God must hide, ere the Inner God can manifest; the cry of agony of the Crucified must be wrung from the tortured lips; “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?” precedes the realisation of the God within.
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 recognising that Providence works through the common sense of individual brains.
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”.