“Unpleasant behavior is sick behavior. Few people want to think about this fact, but you will do so. From now on you will see that unpleasant people are sick people. You know the thousand varieties of unpleasantness, including sarcastic accusations, delirious demands, repulsive self-worship, a cold and hostile face. If your behavior is unpleasant, you must see that you have chosen midnight over noon and see that you will stumble and fall in your own darkness. If another person is unpleasant, realize that your wish for sunlight must have nothing to do with his darkness.”

     “You are trying to reach the place where you can say, ‘No one can hurt me now.’ Trying to reach it prevents you from reaching it.”

     “Take one instance of a depressed, forlorn, heavy-spirited state and track it back to its origin in some thought or comment. Thought-watching is absolutely necessary for you to catch thoughts and comments passing through your mind — false elation, gloom, etc. No matter what you’re doing, be a thought watcher. Watch your thoughts until they dissolve, and watch your life and mind become new and fresh.”

     “If you did not take pleasure in anger, you would not be angry about anything. There is a great sick pleasure and ego excitement in the thrill of hating or any other negative emotion.”

     “Suffering always runs along the track of mechanical thought, so by permitting consciousness to interrupt mechanical thought, we learn the secret for ending suffering.”

     “If you let others carry a lamp for you, they may lag or rush ahead, but carry your own lamp and it is impossible to ever be out of the light.”

     “Sooner or later, for the first time, you will catch a glimpse of that Something Else you somehow sensed just had to exist out there.”

     “Disorders are healed when lifted to a higher plane of thought than the plane which caused them, for on this higher plane we cease to interfere with the healing.”

     “Here is a fundamental truth. Your free nature — your essence — your kingdom within — use any name you want — is free from all problems, from all anxieties, from all tensions, from all nervousness, from all groping around in the dark as to what life is all about. Your original nature is a totally free element. It has no problems at all! This is Truth. This is reality. This is what God is — and God cannot have any problems at all. When we are unified with this state, when we have come back home to it, we are free human beings.”

     “How come your prayers aren’t answered? In the first place, you want God — what you call ‘God’ — to give you an advantage over someone else. Or you want God to unmake the mess you got into through your own ignorance, and through your own vanity and through your own pride. And one of the worst things that can happen is to have an accidental answer that we attribute to God, because now we’re even further into the illusion that, ‘If I pray in a certain way, God will answer this prayer.’”

     “Practice these principles with no concern for results, for a planted seed is quite capable of developing in the dark.”

     “You learn about God by learning about Satan. You learn about Satan by learning about God.”

     “The next time you feel pushed around by life, ask who is the pusher and who is the pushed.”

     “You don’t know what to do when you look at another face, even a face you’ve seen a thousand times before, do you? You study them to get your clue. If they’re laughing, you laugh. If they’re solemn, you’re solemn. WHY DON’T YOU ESTABLISH THE MOOD WITH EVERYONE YOU MEET. Why don’t you be 100% spiritual, therefore, 100% in charge of yourself and you take the lead. Watch what happens. The first thing that’ll happen is you’ll be so at ease. You’re not concerned with any wrong reactions that they might have, whether they’re angry or whether they’re trying to trick you because you know what’s going on. You’re in charge of yourself. No one else can be in charge of you.”

     “You must reflect all day long about your need for allowing Supreme Truth to be the only governor of your life. You have to be constantly at work wherever you are, whatever you are doing. You must realize that your life isn’t supposed to be spent hoeing the corn in the field or tapping the typewriter. That’s incidental, that’s casual.
     You’re supposed to be thinking all the time about your life, not about your occupation, not about your physical action, not about your dinner, not about how you were slighted when you wanted to be praised. I said you have to think about letting Truth be the governing factor in your life.”

     “We read a truth, a fact. And then we very easily get careless with it, forget it or think we already understand it. So do bring yourself back to simply thinking about — and reflecting on — a fundamental truth — and you can’t get one that is too simple. Don’t make the mistake, which many people do who come to these classes for the first time, of thinking you already understand the words. There’s a great difference between familiarity with a word — perhaps the word ‘love’ — and understanding and actually living the state which this word represents.”

     “The hoax was played on you and on me — so subtly, so carefully and so persistently, that you didn’t know what was happening to you. And finally, when you woke up one morning — with the heartache, with that tragedy, with that mess in your life, with that pain, with that anxiety, with that worry — then it dawned on you that something was seriously wrong with you, with you personally! Don’t you dare — shift the blame to anyone else. You are responsible for breaking the hoax that was imposed on you!”

     “If I could stand on a mountain top overlooking the entire world, I would shout down, ‘You don’t know you are being taken.’”

     “Most of you have a flippant attitude towards the devil, which means he has won. He exists and torments you because you allow him to.”

     “Ask, ‘What is my state right now?’ Go through the day and night asking yourself that question.”

     “You will understand human badness better by seeing its cause in deep, haunting and unadmitted insecurity.”

     “You hope for a miracle in your life. It is possible for you to experience a real miracle. It happens when you hear your silence speak.”

     “One cruel trick of a sick teacher is to take a harmful human trait and use clever words to make it appear to be a healthy characteristic. This succeeds in popular lectures and articles because this is what most audiences want to hear. For example, a sick teacher declares that shyness is a type of modesty, a form of consideration for other people which lets others do the talking. The fact is that shyness is a form of unwholeness, and a million words of deceitful flattery will not reduce the shy person’s pain one bit.”

     “I will give you a guaranteed method for keeping yourself dull and dejected: just find pleasure in another person’s real or imaginary mistake.”

     “When something that is not of your world begins to change your world you will know it, and know it surely and silently.”

     “The world is out to get you all right, but if you are not the you the world thinks you are, it cannot get you.”

“Only noise makes mistakes. Silence never makes mistakes.”

     “Your silence cannot give out its wisdom as long
as your mouth is giving out its nonsense.”

“Always ask yourself these questions:
Is it true? Is it kind? Is it necessary?”

“Truth will show you what to do with yourself every day just as soon as you no longer know what to do.”      “Here is the difference between mental sickness and spiritual health. Mental sickness dramatizes human suffering, which makes it incapable of offering the cure. Spiritual health understands human suffering, which qualifies it to present the cure.”      “I falsely love what I see because I falsely love what I am. I am only what I see. When seeing through the net of ideas, inner division stops.”      “An inconsiderate person does not see how much unnecessary work he selfishly piles on others. Not seeing this fact he hurts with disbelieving indignation when told about it.”      “If you really understand human nature you will know everything needed to know to live skillfully in this world. But if you merely pretend to know human nature you will be the helpless victim of people and events. Now do you think it worthwhile to really understand human nature?”      “I didn’t know there was a law against ignoring someone you don’t want to talk to.”      “My rights consist of ignoring your idiocy when you scream for your rights.”

     “The devil is a raging worry to himself and loves it. He therefore works fiercely to make you think that you have worries so that he can continue to masquerade as you. Your detection of this trick frees you of both the devil and his worries.”

     “The secret of spiritual success is to repeatedly let the house collapse on top of you so often and so watchfully that you finally see that there is neither a house to collapse nor anyone for it to collapse upon.”

     “If you take, you will have less. If you give, you will have more. This is spiritual law. This higher kind of giving will be easier understood by thinking of it as release. You release your old nature, which in turn causes the releasing and the giving of the new nature. In this higher state there is no personal giver and no personal receiver; there is only natural and healthy giving of the Universe to itself.”

     “Imitation is always unconscious. A person imitating another’s ideas or behavior patterns is unaware of doing so. He insists his ways are both original and independent. He will resist being told otherwise, for his cluster of imitations have hardened into what he calls his ‘I’ and ‘me’. The last thing he will permit is the destruction of what he calls his ‘individuality’. Among other errors, he fails to realize that by borrowing another man’s habits he also borrows that man’s problems.”

     “Great power is found in the word risk. Risk everything that you have called yourself, your habits. Enter every day into as many risks as possible instead of being the cowards we have been all our lives. Risk rejection so that the time comes when the word has no meaning to you at all. Risk losing the warm feelings you get from another. Risk one thing tomorrow and two the next day. See your dependent behavior, your nervous behavior. ‘I am not going to please you any more so that you will be pleased with me. I am not going to compromise with you.’ Risk the good opinion I have of myself.”

     “If truth is leading you, it will also make decisions for you. And since these decisions are right, they will also make you feel right. So what does it mean if you are still using your usual mind to make your own strained decisions? It means you are not yet taking your decisions from the available cosmic compass. Remember that truth will never lead you into a circumstance without also showing you exactly what to do while within it. It is truth’s very nature to reveal clearly to you your needful actions. It is impossible for truth to abandon you. If you feel abandoned, you should see that you have carelessly led yourself into the circumstance. This insight allows the cosmic compass to correct your life-direction.”

     Your day is filled with strain and pain because of a certain unseen and frantic activity. You try to prove that you can leap over the tall wall, and preferably ahead of everyone else. Do you know that there is really neither a wall nor a leaper? You had better discover what that means.

     Don’t ever accept anger in yourself or others as being right. If you will refuse to accept anger, hostility and hatred — this inner violence — as right and necessary, you will then begin to see where the actual cause of your problems is. You now justify violence in yourself and others you are allied with. They hate the same things you do, and you justify each other’s hatred.