Vernon Linwood Howard (March 16, 1918 – August 23, 1992) was an American spiritual teacher, author, and philosopher.
What you really want for yourself is always trying to break through, just as a cooling breeze flows through an open window on a hot day. Your part is to open the windows of your mind.
Do not mistake desire for love. Desire leaves home in a frantic search for one gratification after another. Love is at home with itself.
There is no way reality can be prevented from flowing the way it flows. It is our vain attempts to force it to flow in the service of our imaginary needs which sets us in painful conflict with our- selves and nature. You are not separate from the flowing reality; you are that flowing reality. See this and you will not see any- thing else which conflicts with it. You will be what you see.
Ignorant people remain ignorant because they have a secret agreement to call one another intelligent.
All we have to do is to receive what we are given. . . We are given the naturalness to love someone, to be calm in crisis, to ignore self-defeating suggestions, to be pleasant, forgiving, tender, helpful, unworried, brave, energetic.
When you are genuinely strong, you neither attack nor defend and so retain your energy.
The world consists of imaginary people, claiming imaginary virtues and suffering from imaginary happiness.
Genuine kindness is not what we do, it is what we are.
Your central self is totally untouched by grief, confusion, desperation.
Learn to see things as they really are, not as we imagine they are.
Who asks a king for a penny?
Study carefully the law of cause and effect.
A clear understanding of negative emotions dismisses them.
We are slaves to whatever we don't understand.
We can accept God becoming Man to save Man, but not Man becoming God to save himself.
Aloneness is a wise teacher. Kierkegaard remarked that one sign of spiritual maturity was the ability to be comfortable when alone.
Can you think of anything more permanently elating than to know that you are on the right road at last?
Every day that you attempt to see things as they are in truth Is a supremely successful day.
When one plan that you have, to get this or to get that, to advance in the world, or whatever it might be, when that seems in danger of veering off the path you have set for it, you have your emergency plan ready. And in simple language what that emergency plan is, what you put into operation, is called worry. If you can worry you are occupied, and what an incredible human situation it is!
The reason why most people are frustrated is because a lie cannot be turned into a truth.