50 Spiritual Classics Timeless wisdom from 50 great books of inner discovery, enlightenment, and purpose

Love

• “What is the best time to do each thing? Who are the most important people to work with?What is the most important thing to do at all times?”the most important time is now;the most important person is the one you are with;the most important act is making the person next to you happy.- The Miracle of Mindfulness, Thich Nhat Hanh
• “There are no ordinary moments!” - Way of the Peaceful Warrior
• A warrior is “happy without reason.” “The warrior acts… and the fool only reacts.”
• What you do to another person, at another level you are really doing to yourself.
• Love and forgiveness is the highest lesson to be learned.
• Love is more important than power.
• If we “stay present to the pain of disapproval or betrayal”—or any other painful feeling—Chödrön suggests it has a way of softening us. If we suppress it we only become a brittle person.
• Chödrön is aware how difficult it is to wish goodwill on someone you may normally feel like hating, and that is the idea: to work the muscles of the heart so that it becomes larger. If you fail in sending goodwill to someone you don’t feel it for, then you can stop. The idea is not to force yourself to be a saint, but to stretch what you are capable of in terms of compassion and loving kindness.
• Another practice to unharden the heart is to rejoice in others’ good fortune.
• Chödrön likes to practice aspiration in shops and supermarkets, where the opportunity for getting annoyed is high. Using aspiration, you can handle anyone because now you see them as basically another aspect of yourself.
• “There are many in the world dying for a piece of bread but there are many more dying for a little love.”
• In addition to physical help, give spiritual solace to those in need.

Mind

• Bhagavad-Gita says: “All actions take place in time by the interweaving of the forces of nature, but the man lost in selfish delusion thinks that he himself is the actor.”
• Krishnamurti suggests that the desire to become something always ends in disappointment or emptiness. It is not an intelligent way to live because it means you are always unhappy with the present, captured by envy and endless unsatisfied desires
• Nothing lasts forever anyway, so the world is much better served by people who work without the ugliness of desire for gain.
• Fear, pain, doubt, anger, and anxiety all derive from a separate sense of self.
• “When the mind is disturbed, the multiplicity of things is produced, but when the mind is quieted, the multiplicity of things disappears.”
• Most people feel comfortable with religion because it keeps them within the walls of their own thinking and habits, never tasting the freedom that exists beyond.
• If a person’s religion succeeds in making them more whole and providing inspiration, then it works.
• Become a real revolutionary by learning how to think beyond the confines of culture.
• Whether in failure or success, we must never take our eyes away from the fact that it is an amazing world, and we must rise to its challenges.
• You can say “I’m OK” on both good days and bad days, you will have made progress; you can have little to fear. 
• The moment you completely accept your non-peace, your non-peace becomes transmuted into peace.
• An awareness of eternity necessarily changes how we see day-to-day living.
• If you and I would cleanse the mind every day, free it of yesterday’s reminiscences, each one of us would then have a fresh mind, a mind capable of dealing with the many problems of existence.”
• We can enrich our life by tapping into the vast intelligence of the universe that exists beyond our brain. Paradoxically, by stopping the incessant chatter of the mind, we also gain self-knowledge. Thus not thinking, if it is done with purpose, can be the highest form of intelligence.
• “For most of your life you’ve lived as the effect of your experiences. Now, you’re invited to be the cause of them.”
• Socrates he discovers that the only way to have peace of mind and really to love life is to have a philosophy of “unreasonable happiness.”

Life

• Respect the world by taking responsibility for your own life.
• Extreme gratitude enables you to see the world afresh.
• Appreciate the world as it is, not how you would like it to be.
• Education is about how to love, how to live simply, how to free our mind from prejudice, superstition, and fear. Without this knowledge we will walk through life in an almost mechanical way, instead of becoming the truly creative person we could be. “If the mind does not penetrate beyond its own barriers,” Krishnamurti states, “there is misery.”
• The object of living is to find truth, and if we are not actively engaged in trying to get closer to the heart of things, then we are quickly dying.
• Doing what you love has a double benefit: not only will you find an uncommon level of contentment in daily life, but your enthusiasm for the work will take care of “success.
• “You can be creative only when there is abandonment—which means, really, when there is no sense of compulsion, no fear of not being, of not gaining, of not arriving.” 
• Go beyond color and creed to see the basic unity of humankind.
• Attain real peace by moving beyond the ego’s fears and wants and living a life of the spirit.
• A purely rational approach to life leads to madness. Peace requires us to look for the unseen quality or truth behind appearances.
• Lose your self-importance and adopt a strategy of unreasonable happiness.

Quantum Physics

• Einstein’s theory of relativity, however, showed that matter does not possess the solidity that our senses accord it. Things are not “things” but energy, which takes on the appearance and feel of form. The nature of the world is not solidity but perpetual motion.
• The “empty space” has an almost alive quality and particles can spontaneously appear out of it for no apparent reason.“Matter has appeared in these experiments as completely mutable. All particles can be transmuted into other particles; they can be created from energy and can vanish into energy.”
• In quantum physics, the creation or destruction of particles often happens for no reason. There is a field out of which they arise, and into which they go back, but they seem to act as if they are beyond cause and effect. Hinduism, for instance, has a word for this void, Brahman, a field of potentiality from which all things emerge, and the Dance of Shiva expresses the endless process of creation and destruction of matter. In Buddhism, the Sunyata is a living void that gives birth to everything physical. Taoism has as its central feature the Tao, the empty, formless nature of the universe, which nevertheless is the basic substance of creation.
• “Life does continually go up and down. People and situations are unpredictable and so is everything else.”

Death

• “People associate death as losing our life force, when actually the opposite is true. We forfeit our body in death, but our eternal life energy unites with the force of a divine oversoul. Death is not darkness, but light.”
• Physical death is merely an event in the movement of a soul from one domain to another.
• “We choose our next world through what we learn in this one. Learn nothing, and the next world is the same as this one, all the same limitations and lead weights to overcome.” We must seek our own perfection—this is the reason for living. - Richard bach

Spirituality

• “Because you think you have body or mind, you have lonely feelings, but when you realize that everything is just a flashing into the vast universe, you become very strong, and your existence becomes very meaningful.”
• “Do not be subject to labels; do not be full of schemes; do not assume you are in charge of affairs; do not be subject to knowledge. Comprehend the infinite, and roam in the traceless.” 
• People who comprehend the Tao are free from worry about the cycle of birth and death, good fortune or bad. They can live without too much investment in seeking great things or avoiding bad things, their happiness coming from perfect calmness and detachment. They  see everything as part of the whole. They cannot be offended or have their reputation ruined, because their eyes are on larger things.
• Most people try to find fulfillment, but the wise person seeks to be empty, a channel for the Tao. A Tao-attuned person has a child’s delight in life combined with the wisdom of a sage.
• “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.”
• Meaningful coincidences are a sign of the spiritual evolution of the human race.
• Most people on the spiritual path start off by giving a certain amount of time or energy to spiritual matters, but then realize that all of life is a spiritual matter—there is nothing that is not.
• An evolved person always had a certain detachment, at ease with themselves no matter what the circumstances.
• “Be grateful as your deeds become less and less associated with your name, as your feet ever more lightly tread the earth.” -  G.I.Gurdjieff
• Instead of striving for great spiritual heights, gain peace and power from the acceptance of life as it is.
• Existence, though it may seem a bewildering and fearful tumult of separate people, places, events, and feelings, is like the river in that it is really all one current. And in its oneness it is perfect. - Siddartha
• The message of Siddartha is that we should not try to withdraw from life to have a superior feeling of holiness, but throw ourselves into things. Filled with events, thoughts, and relationships, life often seems terribly fragmented, but from the perspective of the bank it is one, smooth-flowing river of experience. If you can appreciate this unity, you become less wrapped up in yourself and identify with the larger flow of life.
• “People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don’t even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child—our own two eyes. All is a miracle.” 
• Approach everything in life in a spirit of friendship.
• “In quietness are all things answered, and is every problem quietly resolved.”
• “All things work together for good. There are no exceptions except in the ego’s judgment.”
• Inner spiritual progress can motivate great earthly achievements.
• Equanimity is perhaps the greatest spiritual gift, not in a fatalistic sense, but in affirming the beauty of life in all its imperfections.
• “The fruit of silence is prayer; The fruit of prayer is faith; The fruit of faith is love; The fruit of love is service; The fruit of service is peace.” - Mother Teresa
• “When you choose the energy of your soul—when you choose to create with the intentions of love, forgiveness, humbleness and clarity— you gain power.”

Meditation

• In meditation we disconnect from our ego and our senses. If we do have thoughts during meditation, ultimately they will come only as intuition or guidance, not sabotaging thoughts.
• “If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything; it is open to everything. In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities; in the expert’s mind there are few.”
• Ram Dass’s own conclusion was that drugs were only one door into higher knowledge, pointing out: “The goal of the path is to BE high, not GET high.”
• Intense spiritual experience can change the life of even the most unlikely person.
• A peaceful and intelligent mind can be attained through simply sitting and breathing.
• Meditation is the highest form of self-expression.
• Via meditation, prayer, or reflection we are better able to recognize these directions and live in accord with what our soul really wants. 
• The more time we spend in meditation, the more ordered our world becomes. If we have a calm mind, in touch with what is real and stable, our life has a way of sorting itself out. This is the intelligent, natural way of being.

God

• Set aside time in your life to honor God and all that has been created.
• If God had created everything, the only thing we could offer back was our suffering.
• “The closer you live to God, the smaller everything else appears.” Real spirituality means accepting everything, good and bad, darkness and light, as part of the whole.
• “All the troubles of the world, especially spiritual troubles such as impatience, hopelessness, and despair, derive from the failure to see the grandeur of God clearly.” -  Abraham Isaac Kook
• Self-fulfillment is only achieved through greater knowledge of God.
• From one bit of existence, the soul can perceive the existence of God, which has neither beginning nor end.”
• “If you think of yourself as something, then God cannot clothe himself in you, for God is infinite.”
• The paradox of the successful person is that although they have got where they have through self-control, genuine success will only emerge when they let go of self-regard and just became a tool of God.
• The relationship between God and us is not one of master and servant, but of equals engaged in creating the world.

-50 Spiritual Classics Timeless wisdom from 50 great books of
inner discovery, enlightenment, and purpose
http://203.128.31.71/articles/1857883497.pdf