You have to grow from the inside out. None can teach you, none can make you spiritual. There is no other teacher but your own soul.

Recommended reading: Raja Yoga.

The sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.

Recommended reading: Man and His Symbols.

The lie that keeps hope and dreams intact is preferable to a truth that removes them. Lies and truths are easy to come by but dreams that sustain people through difficult lives are not.

Recommended reading: The Traveller: Observations from an American in Exile.

Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.

Recommended reading: The Prophet.

It seems to be important to believe people to be good even if they tend to be bad, because your own joy and happiness in life is increased that way, and the pleasures of the belief outweigh the occasional disappointments.

Recommended reading: The End of Eternity.

Everyone has inside of him a piece of good news. The good news is that you don’t know how great you can be. How much you can love. What you can accomplish. And what your potential is.

Recommended reading: Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl.

What you are will show, ultimately. Start now, every day, becoming, in your actions, your regular actions, what you would like to become in the bigger scheme of things.

Recommended reading: Letters to a Young Artist: Straight-up Advice on Making a Life in the Arts-For Actors, Performers, Writers, and Artists of Every Kind.

The capacity to be alone is the capacity to love. It may look paradoxical to you, but it’s not. It is an existential truth: only those people who are capable of being alone are capable of love, of sharing, of going into the deepest core of another person – without possessing the other, without becoming dependent on the other, without reducing the other to a thing, and without becoming addicted to the other. They allow the other absolute freedom, because they know that if the other leaves, they will be as happy as they are now. Their happiness cannot be taken by the other, because it is not given by the other.

Recommended reading: Courage: The Joy of Living Dangerously.

 

To finish the moment, to find the journey’s end in every step of the road, to live the greatest number of good hours, is wisdom.

Recommended reading: The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

We do the best we can with the tools we have at our disposal… There is nobility in the effort, courage in the dailiness – the doggedness. It is a process of trying and failing. Of beginning again.

Recommended reading: The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself.