“Discontent is the source of all trouble,but also of all progress, in individuals and nations.”

What will people say-in these words lies the tyranny of the world, the whole destruction of our natural disposition, the oblique vision of our minds. These four words hold sway everywhere.

Years teach us more than books.

Gratitude is a soil on which joy thrives.

If you sound great in the practice room, you’re practicing the wrong thing. Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.

All men are selfish, but the vain man is in love with himself. He admires, like the lover his adored one, everything which to others is indifferent.

Of all afflictions, the worst is self contempt.

No mortal eye has ever fully seen a flash of lightning … for no matter how firmly we look, our eyes are sure to be dazzled.

Some men, like modern shops, hang everything in their show windows; when one goes inside, nothing is to be found.

Judaism lives not in an abstract creed, but in its institutions.

Truly, one gets easier accustomed to a silken bed than to a sack of leaves.

Weak men are easily put out of humor. Oil freezes quicker than water.

To acquire money requires valor, to keep money requires prudence, and to spend money well is an art.

It is only when one is thoroughly true that there can be purity and freedom. Falsehood always punishes itself.

To harbor hatred and animosity in the soul makes one irritable, gloomy, and prematurely old.

Only he is free who cultivates his own thoughts and strives without fear to do justice to them.

Our second mother, habit, is also a good mother.

I think a toxic message in a lot of Christianity has been that the self has to be annihilated in order for God to be found. I think that has been a toxic message.

Wait for those unguarded moments. Relax the mood and, like the child dropping off to sleep, the subject often reveals his truest self.

I came to a clear internal realization that there was nothing I could do as a separated self that would ever fulfill me.

The man of fixed ingrained principles who has mapped out a straight course, and has the courage and self-control to adhere to it, does not find life complex. Complexities are all of our own making.

There is such wonderful balm in self-imposed sacrifice.

To study the Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self.

Yoga is an interior penetration leading to integration of being, senses, breath, mind, intelligence, consciousness, and Self. It is definitely an inward journey, evolution through involution, toward the Soul, which in turn desires to emerge and embrace you in its glory.

A self-made man? Yes, and one who worships his creator.