Quotes on Way

When superior people hear of the Way, they carry it out with diligence. When middling people hear of the Way, it sometimes seems to be there, sometimes not. When lesser people hear of the Way, they ridicule it greatly. If they didn't laugh at it, it wouldn't be the Way.

You might believe that it's only for their own good, but how does it feel when you try to manipulate the people you love? Are you teaching them that your love is conditional? Maybe through inquiry we can find another way.

I am very protective. I just want to make sure that she can have a healthy, safe, normal life...in the back of my mind, she's my priority. And life is completely different now. I feel really, really just lucky that I can still do what I love, and now have a way bigger meaning. And that's to be her mother.

A way foolishness has of revenging itself is to excommunicate the world.

I think there will come a time when civilized people will look back in horror on our generation and the ones that have preceded it; the idea that we should eat other living things running around on four legs, that we should raise them just for the purpose of killing them! The people of the future will say 'meat-eaters' in disgust and regard us in the same way that we regard cannibals and cannibalism.

Commercial jazz, soap opera, pulp fiction, comic strips, the movies set the images, mannerisms, standards, and aims of the urban masses. In one way or another, everyone is equal before these cultural machines; like technology itself, the mass media are nearly universal in their incidence and appeal. They are a kind of common denominator, a kind of scheme for pre-scheduled, mass emotions.

What childishness is it that while there's breath of life in our bodies, we are determined to rush to see the sun the other way around?

If an opportunity scares you, that's God's way of saying you should jump at it.

Failure does not exist. Failure is simply someone else's opinion of how a certain act should have been completed. Once you believe that no act must be performed in any specific other-directed way, then failing becomes impossible.

I had found a kind of serenity, a new maturity. I didn't feel better or stronger than anyone else but it seemed no longer important whether everyone loved me or not - more important now was for me to love them. Feeling that way turns your whole life around; living becomes the act of giving.

Why should we defend ourselves when we are misunderstood and misjudged? Let us leave that aside. Let us not say anything. It is so sweet to let others judge us in any way they like. O blessed silence, which gives so much peace to the soul!

When one of your children tells a lie, be honest with him; tell him that you have told hundreds of them yourself. Tell him it is not the best way; that you have tried it. Tell him as the man did in Maine when his boy left home: "John, honesty is the best policy; I have tried both."

Wealth and rank are what men desire, but unless they be obtained in the right way they may not be possessed. Poverty and obscurity are what men detest; but unless prosperity be brought about in the right way, they are not to be abandoned.

Yes, even I am dishonest. Not in many ways, but in some. Forty-one, I think it is.

A newborn child has to cry, for only in this way will his lungs expand. A doctor once told me of a child who could not breathe when it was born. In order to make it breathe the doctor gave it a slight blow. The mother must have thought the doctor cruel. But he was really doing the kindest thing possible. As with newborn children the lungs are contracted, so are our spiritual lungs. But through suffering God strikes us in love. Then our lungs expand and we can breathe and pray.

We live thick and are in each other's way, and stumble over one another, and I think we thus lose some respect for one another.

Imaginary pains are by far the most real we suffer, since we feel a constant need for them and invent them because there is no way of doing without them.

The folks who go after grand challenges are impatient. They're pissed off. They're sick and tired, but in a passionate way. They're driven by a fire in their bellies to make a difference.

Everything that is of authentic value in life has arisen out of meditation. There is no other way. Meditation is the mother of art, music, poetry, dance, sculpture. All that is creative, all that is life-affirmative, is born out of meditation. All that is life-negative - hate, anger, jealousy, violence, war - is born out of the mind. Man has two possibilities: mind and meditation.

I repeat again: the male mind is egoistic. You have to learn the way of the feminine, you have to become egoless, you have to learn the path of surrender. You have to learn how to melt into existence, how to become one with the rivers and the mountains and the clouds, how to feel affinity, attunement, at-onement. And then slowly, slowly you become a host. The day you are a host, the Guest comes.

We are much harder on people who betray us in small ways than on people who betray others in great ones.