“If you want a quality, act as if you already had it.”

We want all our friends to tell us our bad qualities; it is only the particular ass that does so whom we can’t tolerate.

The education of attention would be an education par excellence

The ultimate test of what a truth means is the conduct it dictates or inspires.

An act has no ethical quality whatever unless it be chosen out of several all equally possible.

It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all.

One of the greatest discoveries of our time is that a man can alter the state of their life by altering the state of their mind.

I don’t sing because I’m happy; I’m happy because I sing.

The great use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it.

That which is most personal, is most interesting.

The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.

The sovereign cure for worry is prayer.

We forget that every good that is worth possessing must be paid for in strokes of daily effort.

The lunatic’s visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact.

The most immutable barrier in nature is between one man’s thoughts and another’s.

A man with no philosophy in him is the most inauspicious and unprofitable of all possible social mates.

There is but one cause of human failure. And that is man’s lack of faith in his true Self.

Obedience is detachment from the self. This is the most radical detachment of all. But what is the self? The self is the principle of reason and responsibility in us. It is the root of freedom, it is what makes us men.

You know, your species [humans] has the most amazing capacity for self-deception, matched only by its ingenuity in trying to destroy itself.

Writing is the thing that sustains me and keeps me going. It is a form of self-preservation for me.

I live by the simplest, perhaps facile command that Jesus ever gave, which is to love God with the whole self and the neighbor as the self, and I find that’s entirely consuming. To do those two things leaves me very little time to do much else.

I was being called to surrender the very citadel of my self. I was completely in the dark. I did not really know what repentance was or what I was required to repent of. It was indeed the turning point of my life.

The one thing which you have to abandon unconditionally is your self.

Transcendent Oneness does not require self-examination, self-help, or self-work. It requires self-loss.

People sinking into self-pity and depression are dreary, but they can’t get out of it by themselves. So every now and then, just sit there and listen, and listen, and listen. You’re paying your membership dues in the human race.