Fear is a pair of handcuffs on your soul.
I have absolutely no doubt that there is an intense anti-Americanism in all Western Europe, and I think the reason for that is a very, very simple one.
The essential feature, and necessity of life is to know reality, which means knowing God.
Its avowed purpose is to excite sexual desire, which, I should have thought, is unnecessary in the case of the young, inconvenient in the case of the middle aged, and unseemly in the old.
For us humans, everything is permanent - until it changes, as we are immortal until we die
It's the circumstances of popular monarchy, the manner in which it's developed, and it is also the fault of the people who present her with this unquestioning adulation. In other words, it's their lack of a larger faith. Which makes them fasten onto, a purely earthly symbol.
It is only possible to succeed at second-rate pursuits - like becoming a millionaire or a prime minister, winning a war, seducing beautiful women, flying through the stratosphere, or landing on the moon. First-rate pursuits - involving, as they must, trying to understand what life is about and trying to convey that understanding - inevitably result in a sense of failure. A Napoleon, a Churchill, or a Roosevelt can feel himself to be successful, but never a Socrates, a Pascal, or a Blake. Understanding is forever unattainable.
Actually I was more of a breaker than a thrower - most of them putters. I broke so many of those that I probably became the world's foremost authority on how to putt without a putter.
Act that your principle of action might safely be made a law for the whole world.
Where the battle rages, there the loyalty of the soldier is proved.
. . every single corner and aspect of our lives, every single choice, will be different if we take the invitation of this [Rumi's] poetry to act from the Divine Center of Silence and allow the glory of the Presence to soak our every movement.