Lovers and mystics are familiar with this sense of grandeur, this taste of joy - in abandoning oneself to the will of others.
If you're a short-seller, that's a cacophony of negative reinforcement. You're basically told that you're wrong in every way imaginable every day. It takes a certain type of individual to drown that noise and negative reinforcement out and to remind oneself that their work is accurate and what they're hearing is not.
To know anything about oneself one must know all about others.
There's nothing more important on our spiritual path than developing gentleness to oneself.
One has to resign oneself to being a nuisance if one wants to get anything done.
Destiny is consciousness of oneself, but consciousness of oneself as an enemy.
No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.
Perfecting oneself is as much unlearning as it is learning.
As my prayer became more attentive and inward, I had less and less to say. I finally became completely silent. . . This is how it is. To pray does not mean to listen to oneself speaking. Prayer involves becoming silent, and being silent, and waiting until God is heard.
Love is a state of being in harmony with oneself.
Books are for reading, not for turning oneself into livestock.
In living through this great epoch, it is difficult to reconcile oneself to the fact that one belongs to that mad, degenerate species that boasts of its free will. How I wish that somewhere there existed an island for those who are wise and of good will. In such a place even I should be an ardent patriot!
There is but one freedom, to put oneself right with death. After that everything is possible.
It is a sign of a dull nature to occupy oneself deeply in matters that concern the body; for instance, to be over much occupied about exercise, about eating and drinking, about easing oneself, about sexual intercourse.
One finds oneself saying: 'I know the right question, but. . . this is not exactly the right time to ask it. '
We must not be timid from a fear of committing faults: the greatest fault of all is to deprive oneself of experience.
The real trouble is that 'kindness' is a quality fatally easy to attribute to ourselves on quite inadequate grounds. Everyone feels benevolent if nothing happens to be annoying him at the moment. Thus a man easily comes to console himself for all his other vices by a conviction that 'his heart's in the right place' and 'he wouldn't hurt a fly,' though in fact he has never made the slightest sacrifice for a fellow creature. We think we are kind when we are only happy: it is not so easy, on the same grounds, to imagine oneself temperate, chaste, or humble.
It is salutary to train oneself to be no more affected by censure than by praise.
What is love? It is not simply compassion, not simply kindness. In compassion there are two: the one who suffers and the one who feels compassion. In kindness there are two: the one who gives and the one who receives. But in love there is only one; the two join, unite, become inseparable. The I and the you vanish. To love means to lose oneself in the beloved.
One has to do sadhana for the total manifestation of the Divine in oneself.