Tremendous Tidbits
by Vernon Howard
Open Doors to Happiness
by Vernon Howard
Permitting your life to be taken over by another person is like letting the waiter eat your dinner.
Find yourself, for courage and confidence are as easy as breathing to the person who really knows who he is.
Some people prolong their unhappiness by dramatizing it, which is like expecting applause for having a headache.
Growing up into the fullness of inner strength is as exciting as seeking gold and as rewarding as finding it.
A warring world has no power to injure your real nature any more than darkness can shake a tree.
We are rewarded according to personal effort, like a man who is given as much land as he can walk over during a day.
Talking about love does not make a man loving any more than talking about sugar makes him a slice of cake.
Society is like a crowd in carnival costumes with everyone fearful that others will see through his disguise.
Danger recognized as danger is not hazardous, as with a sailor who sights and steers away from rocks in the sea.
A truly strong person does not need the approval of others any more than a lion needs the approval of sheep.
Remove the dark cloud of negative thought, and the guiding star of understanding brightly appears.
People worry over the absence of worry, which is like thinking that the end of the storm means the end of the sky.
Man is like a lost tourist who has forgotten he has a map in his pocket which can direct him to his hotel.
If you can talk a monkey out of a banana you can talk logic with someone whose self-interest rejects logic.
Inner liberty can be judged by how often a person feels offended, for you can no more insult a mature man than you can paint the air.
Thinking that stubborn beliefs can give us a new life is like watching a stone statue, hoping it will move.
Life is never too tough for your higher self, any more than a rock is too much for a river.
Talking to the average man about something higher than sex and money is like talking to a rabbit about a rainbow.
Like an army doctor treating enemy soldiers, truth is patient and kindly toward the parts of us which resist correction.
When sad, we need only realize that we are in the wrong place internally, like a lark that belongs in the sky, not in a cage.
Just as a single wave is powered by the entire ocean, a sincere mind has vast resources at its command.
You can refuse entrance to unhappy moods, but you must be alert, just as you might close a window at the first sign of rain.
We can no more enjoy life by hoping for a future result than we can enjoy music by waiting for the final note.
It is as possible to be pleasantly alone with yourself while surrounded by a crowd as it is to walk alone in the peaceful woods.
The truly happy man is one who feels no different when the party ends than he did while it was going on.
Inner guidance is heard like soft music in the night by those who have learned to listen.
Men who fall from a canoe while standing up to attract attention always claim someone pushed them.
Like helpful librarians who aid your search for books, higher powers do for you what you cannot do for yourself.
Your life makes sense when you don’t need other people to confirm that it does, which is the true independence of a soaring eagle.
The difference between living under your own power and under the power of social influence is the difference between songs and tears.
Just as a piano responds to the touch of a musician, a sincere request for solutions will always be answered from a higher source.
Right daily decisions are as simple as smiling, once you see the difference between natural and artificial needs.
The more you let other people tell you how to sail your boat, the less the boat belongs to you.
Loneliness is an impostor who makes you feel far apart from life, but you can see beyond it to happily find yourself approaching home.
Just as there are millions of unseen stars, there are endless inner riches for you to discover.
Foolishness is simply the nervous preference for wrong ideas, like a sailor anxiously hugging a broken compass.
It is no more necessary to live at the mercy of mental howls than it is needful to live next door to a zoo.
Inner correction guarantees outer correction, just as a repaired clock makes its hands go right.
Your true nature never needs to anxiously prove itself to others, but lives in calm command, like a popular king.
Healing finally comes to the sincere seeker, like a sick man who awakens in the morning to find himself cured.
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Examining the doubts we have about our present way is a highly intelligent act.
Anyone weary of stumbling in the dark has taken the first step toward walking in the light.
The one supreme power that will guarantee personal happiness is personal right thinking.
Inner light shows you what to do with yourself all day long, making everything comfortable.
Acquired beliefs and cosmic facts are as different as pebbles and diamonds.
Please people and you achieve nothing, but please your real self and you start a miracle.
Feel the need for something different, then let it grow by having affection for it.
Cosmic wisdom reveals why unhappy events happen, after which they cease to happen.
You are not required to listen to anyone who demands, “What are you doing about my problems?”
Even if all your friends and relatives do not know how to live rightly, you can surely know.
No one is more qualified than you to discover the true treasures of your inner kingdom.
The very nature of your essence is confidence, so why seek this virtue outside of essence?
Freedom from painful decisions is a happy result of discovering who you really are.
Truth has its reasons for acting as it does, and every one of them is for your benefit.
Calm command can replace agitation as surely as sunshine can replace a storm.
All good things come to anyone who refuses to be intimidated by his own despair.
By eliminating the sheep in himself, a man gives psychic wolves nothing to prey upon.
Welcome higher facts without understanding them and in time you will understand.
Truth does not hurt, rather, it is our resistance to its message that causes pain.
When a frantic world tries to carry you away, remind yourself that you need not go.
Self-knowledge creates an inner state in which you are valuable to yourself in a new way.
The feeling of being in danger from oneself fades with the application of higher facts.
Be aware of how people insist upon draining your energy, then quietly refuse it.
Heartache can be conquered because a higher part of you is free and apart from heartache.
It is a bright day when we see that cosmic facts are as practical as a recipe for baking bread.
Reflect often on the interesting idea of getting out of your own way.
We attract events which correspond to our nature, so a higher nature will attract higher events.
One thing that is always right is your eagerness for something higher than yourself.
Most people merely rearrange their problems, but with self-insight you can end them.
By seeing what we fear to see we shatter one of the pillars supporting the haunted house.
Wrong action in the past is corrected perfectly by right action in the present.
Self-concern is caused by living from mere ideas, which is cured by living from essence.
Real courage consists of departing from the false while not yet knowing what is true.
We learn to love the light by seeing clearly what the darkness does to us.
One day you will look calmly at a fear and say to it, “You have shaken me for the last time.”
We can either hear what we want to hear or we can hear the rescuing truths.
Starting now, never again permit hard or disapproving facial expressions to intimidate you.
A quiet mind knows the answer, which means we must cease to fight anxiously for the answer.
Living from your real nature is the same as doing something worthwhile with your life.
If you are now reading this line, you have a rich opportunity to make everything new.
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Realize that using the word love does not make you loving any more than calling yourself a lump of sugar makes you one.
Talking is a thousand times easier than pondering, which is why the talkers overwhelm the earth.
Free yourself of the tyranny of believing in mere words.
There is nothing wrong with nothing happening in your life. See this and something worthwhile will happen.
You are definitely worried about something when it returns repeatedly to your mind.
Knowing that you are lost is exactly the same thing as sensing the way back home.
Lose something before you get it and you will not fear losing it.
Uncertainty is unsafe. Certainty is safe. Safe certainty is spiritual and invisible and is waiting for you to request it to take charge of your life.
Show me what you boast about and I will show you what you hate.
The most common person on earth is the one who causes trouble to other people in order to prop up his shaky and false existence. A rare and sane mind could never commit such evil.
Spiritual facts always sound harmonious. You just have untuned ears.
Only a clear understanding of time-thinking can free you from its folly. For example, an ambitious man can think about acquiring earthly power but he cannot think about finally losing it.
Count the number of enemies you have outside and that is the same number of enemies you have inside.
In a true man, spirit is the king and thought is the obedient servant. In a false man, thought is
the king and the spirit is considered an enemy.The higher power does not need your aid. End your vanity. The higher power seeks to tell you to stop trying to help both it and yourself, for this enables it to help you.
THINKING produces noisy and wrong action. SEEING allows silent and right action.
Did it ever occur to you that your inner kingdom is a sacred place? Now, what is the right attitude to have toward a sacred place?
You must establish a steadfast program for losing confidence in your very own words that you speak so abundantly and so smugly. Your abundant words have no real confidence in them at all — they are scared words.
When faced, a harmful fact can be changed, but you can do nothing with a suppressed delusion but suffer from it.
Interpretation blocks reception while masquerading as reception. Rightness does not need interpretation; it requires simple acceptance and nothing else.
The stupidest reason for accepting something as being right is because you have always accepted it.
As incredible as it sounds, an unhappy man does not realize that happiness is better than unhappiness. Knowing only his own concealed anguish, he worships it, which is the same as
self-worship.Think how your life would be wondrously superior if you realized that truth is never absent from you.
Resurrection is a definite spiritual experience. It is something that HAPPENS to you. It happens when you no longer try to make things happen.
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When appearing as agents for social morality, they solemnly insist it is your moral duty to help others; then when you are betrayed by others, they sit back and laugh at your gullibility and stupidity.
They have violent hatred for any person or idea that is truly good and decent, and rejoice when goodness appears to be injured. They are evil, malignant, depraved, vicious, sick.
One prominent characteristic — an animal-like characteristic — is to secretly sneer at everyone, even those they claim to love.
They force you to pretend interest in some trivial event, in nonsensical solutions to life, then leave you exhausted.
They love to predict and talk about calamities, but never tell you that they cause them.
They disguise themselves as friends, helpers, neighbors, good people — then suddenly drop the role when they have used you for what they can get.
They give you bad advice for helping yourself and when you take it they accuse you of stupidity and claim you will never make it.
They hate you, consider you their permanent enemy.
They torment you with suspicion and then claim that the suspicion is helpful and necessary.
They cunningly promise you rich rewards for listening to them, then desert you to suffer alone with your false gains.
Their evil thrill depends upon your cooperation, for without your ignorant gullibility, they cannot exist.
They sneak evil thoughts into your mind and then threaten you with hell for having them.
They tell you to hate God and then say you are of the devil for doing so.
They insist that confusion is necessary and then demand that you try to prove otherwise.
They succeed in urging you to pass your torment onto others.
The last thing they want you to see is their lack of real power for they know that that would be their finish.
They tell you it is clever or heroic to behave in a certain way and then make you ashamed for doing so.
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You will be nervous and uncertain and afraid.
You will try to cover upyour nervousness by bluff and bluster and one lie after another.
You will be in a state of self-deception, a state which angrily refuses self-honesty.
You will be desperately eager to claim that other people, especially prominent authorities, support your false claims.
You will be unable to see the strain and the unnaturalness of believing that untruth is truth.
You will receive a neurotic thrill from the inward burning of your confusion.
You will have no hesitation in attacking and hurting anyone who threatens to expose your deceit.
You will be unaware that you are believing only what you want to believe, for your preferences for delusion has succeeded superbly.
You will be the self-chosen victim of repeated mental movies in which you see yourself as heroically right and everyone else as wrong.
You will refuse to see that the sense of doom you feel is caused by your own refusal of the light.
You will be inwardly tortured, while pretending outwardly to other people that you are free and happy.
You will continue to fall and get hurt unless you stop believing only what you want to believe, and have the courage and the decency to receive what is true and good.