Faith is an oasis in the heart
which will never be reached
by the caravan of thinking.
Don’t pray when it rains
if you don’t pray when the sun shines.
This is my simple religion.
There is no need for temples;
no need for complicated philosophy.
Our own brain, our own heart is our temple;
the philosophy is kindness.
People are like stained-glass windows.
They sparkle and shine when the sun is out,
but when the darkness sets in,
their true beauty is revealed
only if there is a light from within.
Faith is to believe
what you do not see;
the reward of this faith
is to see what you believe.
Take the first step in faith.
You don’t have to see the whole staircase,
just take the first step.
If you would learn the secret of right relations,
look only for the divine in people and things,
and leave all the rest to God.
We have enough religion to hate each other,
but not enough to love each other.
We are the living links
in a life force that moves and plays
around and through us,
binding the deepest soils
with the farthest stars.
Religions are different roads
converging to the same point.
What does it matter
that we take different roads
as long as we reach the same goal?
Religion is a candle
inside a multicolored lantern.
Everyone looks through a particular color,
but the candle is always there.
Sorrow looks back,
Worry looks around,
Faith looks up.
Humankind has not woven the web of life.
We are but one thread within it.
Whatever we do to the web,
we do to ourselves.
All things are bound together.
All things connect.
There is no separation
between us and God
— we are divine expressions
of the creative principle.
There can be no real lack or scarcity;
there is nothing we have
to try to achieve or attract.
We contain the potential
for everything within us.
There are two types of human activity:
Spiritual practice and everything else.
The everything else
is spiritual practice in disguise.
In everyone’s life, at some time,
our inner fire goes out.
It is then burst into flame
by an encounter
with another human being.
We should all be thankful
for those people who rekindle
the inner spirit.
We are not bodies with souls,
we are souls with bodies.
Let us not look back in anger
or forward in fear,
but around in awareness.
If every day is an awakening,
you will never grow old.
You will just keep growing.
The only lifelong, reliable motivations
are those that come from within,
and one of the strongest of those
is the joy and pride
that grow from knowing
that you’ve just done something
as well as you can do it.
If you cannot find peace within yourself,
you will never find it anywhere else.
As long as anyone believes
that his ideal and purpose is outside him,
that it is above the clouds,
in the past or in the future,
he will go outside himself and seek
fulfillment where it cannot be found.
He will look for solutions
and answers at every point
except where they can be found:
in himself.
If there is no God,
who pops up the next Kleenex?
Life becomes religious
whenever we make it so:
when some new light is seen,
when some deeper appreciation is felt,
when some larger outlook is gained,
when some nobler purpose is formed,
when some task is well done.
It does me no injury for my neighbor to say
there are twenty gods or no god.
Faith sees the invisible,
believes the unbelievable,
and receives the impossible.
God moves in a mysterious way
His wonders to perform;
He plants his footsteps in the sea,
And rides upon the storm.
In the faces of men and women
I see God.
Men talk of “finding God,”
but no wonder it is difficult;
He is hidden in that darkest
hiding-place, your heart.
You yourself are a part of Him.
Two men please God:
who serves Him with all his heart
because he knows Him;
and who seeks Him with all his heart
because he knows Him not.
You must believe in God,
in spite of what the clergy say.
If God did not exist,
it would be necessary to invent him.
All that we are is the result
of what we have thought.
The mind is everything.
What we think, we become.