Every book is a quotation, and every house is a quotation out of all forests and mines and stone quarries, and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.

Read the right books by the right people. Read and read and read. Find an author who really grabs you, read everything he has done, and then read what he has read.

Set out on the path to peace by being alert and mindful to the misery of chasing after the fame, fortune, pleasure, and power goals of a belief in a separate self. Quickly conquer this fictitious being and enjoy the feast of life's true meaning.

The idea in the Western world is bringing the Kingdom of God to earth, or trying `to create the ideal Jewish level which is really a poverty-stricken way of viewing it. As long as we condemn ourselves, no confidence can take place. People are bewildered and only rely on technicians, technocrats, theologians, politicians...

You can say the Jesus Prayer from now til doomsday but if you don't realize that the only thing that counts in the religious life is detachment, I don't see how you'll ever even move an inch. Detachment, buddy, and only detachment. Desirelessness.

All but the sacred few who could not tame
Their spirits to the Conqueror, but as soon
As they had touch the world with living flame
Fled back like eagles to their native noon.

'Not one or the other or both or neither' explains away all arbitrary conceptions

'Selling our souls to the devil' is just a dramatic way of saying 'trading our time for money.'

'All right then,' said the savage defiantly, 'I'm claiming the right to be unhappy… the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat… the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind. I claim them all.'

'Civilization' is seductive where not imperious

'Did you eat something that didn't agree with you?' asked Bernard. The Savage nodded. 'I ate civilization.'

'I live' becomes the objective 'it lives me'… In the Pauline Christ-symbol ('No longer do I live, but Christ liveth in me.') the deepest religious experience of the West and East meet.

'I' is just a thought.

'Love thy neighbor as thyself' surely does not mean that as we are, with all that is in us of fear and hate, we can transmit the divine power of love to our fellowman.

'Miracles have ceased.' Have they indeed? They had not ceased this afternoon when I walked into the wood and got into bright, miraculous sunshine, in shelter from the roaring wind.