Wisdom Quotes - Page 96

People who lean on logic and philosophy and rational exposition end by starving the best part of the mind.

I doubt if a charging elephant, or a rhino, is as determined or hard to check as a socially ambitious mother.

The master secret of happiness is to meet the challenge of each new day with the serene faith that: "All things work together for good to them that love God."

Teach you children poetry; it opens the mind, lends grace to wisdom and makes the heroic virtues hereditary.

It is not easy to find perfect men in whom there is nothing to criticize.

No one knows like a woman how to say things which are at once gentle and deep.

One can no more keep the mind from returning to an idea than the sea from returning to a shore. For a sailor, this is called the tide; in the case of the guilty it is called remorse. God stirs up the soul as well as the ocean.

Nature is pitiless; she never withdraws her flowers, her music, her fragrance, and her sunlight from before human cruelty or suffering.

Indigestion is charged by God with enforcing morality on the stomach.

Day after day I read Freud, thinking myself to be very enlightened and scientific when, as a matter of fact, I was about as scientific as an old woman secretly poring over books about occultism, trying to tell her own fortune, and learning how to dope out the future form the lines in the palm of her hand. I don't know if I ever got very close to needing a padded cell: but if I ever had gone crazy, I think psychoanalysis would have been the one thing chiefly responsible for it.

Souls are like athletes, that need opponents worthy of them, if they are to be tried and extended and pushed to the full use of their powers, and rewarded according to their capacity.

Solitude is a way to defend the spirit against the murderous din of our materialism.

The silence of the spheres is the music of a wedding feast. The more we persist in misunderstanding the phenomena of life, the more we analyze them out into strange finalities and complex purposes of our own, the more we involve ourselves in sadness. But it does not matter much because no despair of ours can alter the reality of things, or stain the joy of the cosmic dance which is always there.

Don't ask who said it? Ask what they said.

If we live in peace ourselves, we in turn may bring peace to others. A peaceable man does more good than a learned one.

I do not feel I have wisdom enough yet to love what is ugly.

Those who have no mental vigilance, Though they may hear the teachings, ponder them or meditate, With minds like water seeping from a leaking jug, Their learning will not settle in their memories.

Enjoy present pleasures in such a way as not to injure future ones.

I discovered that in life, one has got to serve to be observed, if one serve not, one will probably be reserved. Don't wisdom teach this?

The next best thing to knowing something is knowing where to find it.

It's not the sugar that makes the tea sweet, but the stirring.

...This jewel is the wisdom and compassion that it takes to act not on behalf of ourselves but for all beings. This is where real confidence and competence come from. Once we possess this jewel, our life becomes blessed.

Astride a horse I am not, nor camel-like carry a load, Subjects I have none, nor follow any sultan's code; I worry not for what exists, nor fret for what is lost, I breathe with extreme ease, and live at very little cost.

What hurts the soul? To live without tasting the water of its own essence.

How should Spring bring forth a garden on hard stone? Become earth, that you may grow flowers of many colors. For you have been heart-breaking rock. Once, for the sake of experiment, be earth!