Echoes

Constantly regard the universe as one living being, having one substance and one soul; and observe how all things have reference to one perception, the perception of this one living being; and how all things act with one movement; and how all things are the cooperating causes of all things which exist.

The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God's eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love.

All things are interwoven with one another; a sacred bond unites them; there is scarcely one thing that is isolated from another. Everything is coordinated, everything works together in giving form to one universe. The world-order is a unity made up of multiplicity: God is one, pervading all things; all being is one, all law is one (namely, the common reason which all thinking persons possess) and all truth is one– if, as we believe, there can be but one path to perfection for beings that are alike in kind and reason.

Now I will do nothing but listen, to accrue what I hear into this song, to let sounds contribute toward it.

In the midst of silence there was spoken within me a secret word. But to hear this word in stillness, all things must be hushed and at rest in this silence — there must be a stillness, and then we may hear it. The very best and noblest attainment in this life is to be silent and let God work and speak within.

Trees are the earth's endless effort to speak to the listening heaven.

Nature, considered rationally, that is to say, submitted to the process of thought, is a unity in diversity of phenomena; a harmony, blending together all created things, however dissimilar in form and attributes; one great whole animated by the breath of life.

We should follow, men say, the example of the bees, who flit about and cull the flowers that are suitable for producing honey, and then arrange and assort in their cells all that they have brought in. We too should so blend whatever we have gathered from a varied course of reading, that it may be all the clearer for being drawn from many sources; and then, by applying the supervising care with which our nature has endowed us, we should so blend those several flavors into one delicious compound that, even though it betrays its origin, yet it nevertheless is clearly a different thing from that whence it came.

"We know how to speak many false things as though they were true; but we know, when we will, to utter true things." So said the ready-voiced daughters of great Zeus, and they breathed into me a divine voice to celebrate things that shall be and things there were aforetime.

Rocks and waters, etc., are words of God and so are men. We all flow from one fountain Soul. All are expressions of one Love. God does not appear, and flow out, only from narrow chinks and round bored wells here and there in favored races and places, but He flows in grand undivided currents, shoreless and boundless over creeds and forms and all kinds of civilizations and peoples and beasts, saturating all and fountainizing all.

Nothing in all creation is so like God as stillness.

Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise; seek what they sought.

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.

Standing on the bare ground, — my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, — all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.

Great is this force of memory, excessive great, O my God; a large and boundless chamber! Who ever sounded the bottom thereof? Yet is this a power of mine, and belongs unto my nature; nor do I myself comprehend all that I am.

When we read, another person thinks for us: we merely repeat his mental process.

Whilst in speaking of human things, we say that it is necessary to know them before we can love them...the saints on the contrary say in speaking of divine things that it is necessary to love them in order to know them, and that we only enter truth through charity.

The way we are, we are members of each other. All of us. Everything. The difference ain't in who is a member and who is not, but in who knows it and who don't.

Reason is like an officer when the King appears; The officer then loses his power and hides himself. Reason is the shadow cast by God; God is the sun.

Your thought advocates Judaism, Brahmanism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam. In my thought there is only one universal religion, whose varied paths are but the fingers of the loving hand of the Supreme Being. In your thought there are the rich, the poor, and the beggared. My thought holds that there are no riches but life; that we are all beggars, and no benefactor exists save life herself.

The tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao The name that can be named is not the eternal Name. The unnameable is the eternally real. Naming is the origin of all particular things. Free from desire, you realize the mystery. Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations. Yet mystery and manifestations arise from the same source. This source is called darkness. Darkness within darkness. The gateway to all understanding.

I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars.

The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.

Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the letters in which it is composed. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it.

Nature never deceives us; it is we who deceive ourselves.