Life and Existence

This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.

At such moments there is a voice inside which speaks and says: “ This is the real me!”

What’s a man’s first duty? The answer’s brief: to be himself.

Thinking is the endeavor to capture reality by the means of ideas.

When the mind is thinking, is it simply talking to itself, asking questions and answering them, and saying yes or no.

Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then all things are at risk.

Every thinker puts some portion of an apparently stable world in peril and no one can wholly predict what will emerge in its place.

To think and to be fully alive are the same.

To think and to be fully alive are the same.

As the Sandwich Islander believes that the strength and valor of the enemy he kills passes into himself, so we gain the strength of the temptation we resist.

Teaching is an act of love, a spiritual cohabitation, one of the few sacred relationships left in a crass secular world.

The discovery of truth by slow, progressive meditation is talent. Intuition of the truth, not preceded by perceptible meditation, is genius.

The scene of suffering is a scene of joy when the suffering is past; and the silent reminiscence of hardships departed, is sweeter than the presence of delight

Deep, unspeakable suffering may well be called a baptism, a regeneration, the initiation into a new state.

We mount to heaven mostly on the ruins of our cherished schemes, finding our failures were successes.

One day it happens. Success happens and it catches you by surprise. One day you are a signature, next day, you are an autograph.

Every success is usually an admission ticket to a new set of decisions.

Once you fully apprehend the vacuity of a life without struggle you are equipped with the basic means of salvation.

I’ve never forgotten for long at a time that living is struggle. I know that every good and excellent thing in the world stands moment by moment on the razor-edge of danger and must be fought for—whether it’s a field, or a home, or a country.

We take no delight in existence except when we are struggling for something.

The struggle alone pleases us, not the victory. . . . We never seek things for themselves, but for the search.

One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.

It’s better to lose some of the battles in the struggles for your dreams than to be defeated without ever knowing what you’re fighting for.

Where there is sorrow there is holy ground.