"When you are guilty, it is not your sins you hate but yourself. "

de Mello, Anthony on guilt   

"Wisdom tends to grow in proportion to one's awareness of one's ignorance. "

de Mello, Anthony on wisdom   

"When you come to see you are not as wise today as you thought you were yesterday, you are wiser today. "

de Mello, Anthony on   

"We stumble and fall constantly even when we are most enlightened. But when we are in true spiritual darkness, we do not even know that we have fallen."

Merton, Thomas on failure
5 fans of this quote   

"In the last analysis, the individual person is responsible for living his own life and for finding himself. If he persists in shifting his responsibility to somebody else, he fails to find out the meaning of his own existence."

Merton, Thomas on responsibility
7 fans of this quote   

"At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes of our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will."

Merton, Thomas on spirituality
3 fans of this quote   

"The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them."

Merton, Thomas on
3 fans of this quote   

"The light of truth burns without a flicker in the depths of a house that is shaken with storms of passion and fear."

Merton, Thomas on   

"Some men's words I remember so well that I must often use them to express my thought. Yes, because I perceive that we have heard the same truth, but they have heard it better."

Emerson, Ralph Waldo on quotations   

"There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide."

Emerson, Ralph Waldo on education
18 fans of this quote   

"Respect the child. Be not too much his parent. Trespass not on his solitude."

Emerson, Ralph Waldo on education
21 fans of this quote   

"But there is greater comfort in the substance of silence than in the answer to a question."

Merton, Thomas on   

"Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time."

Merton, Thomas on   

"When your tongue is silent, you can rest in the silence of the forest. When your imagination is silent, the forest speaks to you, tells you of its unreality and of the Reality of God. But when your mind is silent, then the forest becomes magnificently real and blazes transparently with the Reality of God."

Merton, Thomas on   

"It is easy when we are in prosperity to give advice to the afflicted."

Aeschylus on advice
13 fans of this quote   

"Perfection of means and confusion of goals seem -- in my opinion -- to characterize our age."

Einstein, Albert on age and aging
9 fans of this quote   

"Then there are the fanatical atheists whose intolerance is the same as that of the religious fanatics, and it springs from the same source ... They are creatures who can't hear the music of the spheres."

Einstein, Albert on fanaticism   

"One had to cram all this stuff into one's mind for the examinations, whether one liked it or not. This coercion had such a deterring effect on me that, after I had passed the final examination, I found the consideration of any scientific problems distasteful to me for an entire year."

Einstein, Albert on education   

"Of all the communities available to us there is not one I would want to devote myself to, except for the society of the true searchers, which has very few living members at any time."

Einstein, Albert on community   

"I have repeatedly said that in my opinion the idea of a personal God is a childlike one, but I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist whose fervor is mostly due to a painful act of liberation from the fetters of religious indoctrination received in youth. I prefer an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our own being."

Einstein, Albert on   

"In other words, a person who is fanatic in matters of religion, and clings to certain ideas about the nature of God and the universe, becomes a person who has no faith at all."

Watts, Alan W. on   

"But the attitude of faith is to let go, and become open to truth, whatever it might turn out to be."

Watts, Alan W. on   

"And the attitude of faith is the very opposite of clinging to belief, of holding on."

Watts, Alan W. on   

"You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself."

Watts, Alan W. on universe   

"The moralist is the person who tells people that they ought to be unselfish, when they still feel like egos, and his efforts are always and invariably futile."

Watts, Alan W. on morality   

"Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes."

Watts, Alan W. on zen
8 fans of this quote   

"Things are as they are. Looking out into it the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations."

Watts, Alan W. on truth   

"This is the real secret of life - to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play."

Watts, Alan W. on work   

"Underneath the superficial self, which pays attention to this and that, there is another self more really us than I. And the more you become aware of the unknown self if you become aware of it the more you realize that it is inseparably connected with everything else that is."

Watts, Alan W. on   

"The twentieth century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy."

Carey, Alex on democracy   

"The boy gathers materials for a temple, and then when he is thirty, concludes to build a woodshed."

Thoreau, Henry David on mediocrity
5 fans of this quote   

"First, I do not sit down at my desk to put into verse something that is already clear in my mind. If it were clear in my mind, I should have no incentive or need to write about it. We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand."

Day-Lewis, Robert Cecil on creativity
5 fans of this quote   

"One of the greatest necessities in America is to discover creative solitude."

Sandburg, Carl on creativity
5 fans of this quote   

"Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense."

Emerson, Ralph Waldo on achievement
102 fans of this quote   

"Think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people."

Yeats, William Butler on language
9 fans of this quote   

"It is wrong to think that love comes from long companionship and persevering courtship. Love is the offspring of spiritual affinity and unless that affinity is created in a moment, it will not be created for years or even generations."

Gibran, Kahlil on love
11 fans of this quote   

"To be angry about trifles is mean and childish; to rage and be furious is brutish; and to maintain perpetual wrath is akin to the practice and temper of devils; but to prevent and suppress rising resentment is wise and glorious, is manly and divine."

Watts, Alan W. on anger
3 fans of this quote