The Greatest Help is Self-Help
“I have come to discover through earnest personal experience and dedicated learning that ultimately the greatest help is self-help; that there is no other help but self-help — doing one’s best, dedicating oneself wholeheartedly to a given task, which happens to have no end but is an on-going process.”
–Bruce Lee (Chinese-American Martial Artist, Actor, Director and Author, 1940-1973)
The Ingredients of Happiness
“One is happy as a result of one’s own efforts, once one knows the necessary ingredients of happiness: simple tastes, a certain degree of courage, self-denial to a point, love of work, and, above all, a clear conscience. Happiness is no vague dream, of that I now feel certain. By the proper use of experience and thought one can draw much from oneself, by determination and patience once can even restore one’s health… so let us live life as it is, and not be ungrateful.”
–George Sand (a.k.a. Amandine Aurore Lucie Dupin, Baroness Dudevant, French Writer, 1804-1876)
Develop Yourself and You Develop the World
“If enough individuals can develop themselves, even partially, into genuine, natural men, able to use the real potentialities that are proper to mankind, each such individual would then be able to convince and win over as many as a hundred other men, who would, each in his turn upon achieving development, be able to influence another hundred, and so on…”
–George Gurdjieff (Armenian-born Adept, Teacher and Writer, c.1873-1949)
Before You Try to Meditate
Anyone who has taught any form of meditation, t’ai chi ch’uan or one of the many other spiritual paths knows that this is absolutely true:
“All too often the mistaken belief that enough sincere practice of prayer or meditation is all that is needed to transform their lives has prevented teachers and students from making use of the helpful teachings of Western psychology. In an unfortunate way, many students of Eastern and Western spirituality have been led to believe that if they experience difficulties, it is simply because they haven’t practiced long enough or somehow have not been practicing according to the teachings. . . .
In truth, the need to deal with our personal emotional problems is the rule in spiritual practice rather than the exception. At least half of the students at our annual three-month retreat find themselves unable to do traditional Insight Meditation because they encounter so much unresolved grief, fear, and wounding and unfinished developmental business from the past that this becomes their meditation.”
–Jack Kornfield (American Meditation Teacher in the Theravadan Buddhist Tradition, 1945-)
We Are All Being Challenged to Grow
“This new mind awaits us in this next stage of our evolutionary journey. We are being challenged by the forces of history to grow into this mind, to mutate, as it were, in order for our species to survive. Jesus had the new mind, called in him the Christ Mind, as did Buddha and others. It is the mind when it is overshadowed by God, our mind when it has become one with His, when we have touched the heavenly light and been permanently altered by it. This state of enlightenment is the exaltation of our existence, the uplifting of our human consciousness to such a high place that we manifest, at last, as the children of God we truly are.”
–Marianne Williamson (American Author, Unity Church Minister and Lecturer on Spirituality, 1952-)
“The Gift of Change: Spiritual Guidance for Living Your Best Life” (Marianne Williamson)
Finding Your Gifts
“Figuring out our gifts in life is part of our journey to becoming enlightened human beings.”
–Allison DuBois (American Writer and Psychic, 1972-)
The Only Real Revolution
“The only real revolution is in the enlightenment of the mind and the improvement of character, the only real emancipation is individual, and the only real revolutionaries are philosophers and saints.”
–Will Durant (American Historian, 1885-1981)
Examine Yourself From Every Side
“Examine thus yourself from every side.
Note harmful thoughts and every futile striving.
Thus it is that heroes in the Bodhisattva path
Apply the remedies to keep a steady mind.”
–Shantideva (Indian Buddhist Scholar at Nalanda University, 8th Century)
Building Character
“Character isn’t inherited. One builds it daily by the way one thinks and acts, thought by thought, action by action. If one lets fear or hate or anger take possession of the mind, they become self-forged chains.”
–Helen Gahagan Douglas (American Actress and Liberal Democratic Politician, 1900-1980)
The First Step: Self-Mastery
“Begin at once a program of self-mastery. But start modestly, with the little things that bother you. When you call your child, be prepared that she may not respond to you, or if she does, she might not do what you want her to do. Under these circumstances, it doesn’t help your child for you to become agitated. It should not be in her power to cause you any disturbance”
–Epictetus (Phrygian-born Greek Stoic Philosopher, c.A.D.55- c.A.D.135)
