We gather strength from sadness and from pain Each time we die we learn to live again.

We gather strength from sadness and from pain Each time we die we learn to live again.

I never asked you to earn me. I want only that you should need me. Your path is not one read more

I never asked you to earn me. I want only that you should need me. Your path is not one of merit. Bring the recurring desires of your mind to me, every time they emerge. They cannot shock me, for I willed them! Bring me your confusion, your fear, your craving, your anxiety, your inability to love the world, your hesitation to serve, your jealousy, all the deficiencies that defy your spiritual disciplines.

Sadness does not inhere in things; it does not reach us from the world and through mere contemplation of the read more

Sadness does not inhere in things; it does not reach us from the world and through mere contemplation of the world. It is a product of our own thought. We create it out of whole cloth.

There can be no rainbow without a cloud and a storm.

There can be no rainbow without a cloud and a storm.

A feeling of sadness and longing,
That is not akin to pain,
And resembles sorrow only
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A feeling of sadness and longing,
That is not akin to pain,
And resembles sorrow only
As the mist resembles the rain.

We look before and after,
And pine for what is not,
Our sincerest laughter
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We look before and after,
And pine for what is not,
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught:
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.

Dear to us are those who love us. . . but dearer are those who reject us as unworthy, for read more

Dear to us are those who love us. . . but dearer are those who reject us as unworthy, for they add another life; they build a heaven before us whereof we had not dreamed, and thereby supply to us new powers out of the recesses of the spirit . . .

I take rejection as someone blowing a bugle in my ear to wake me up and get going, rather than read more

I take rejection as someone blowing a bugle in my ear to wake me up and get going, rather than retreat.

Human beings, like plants, grow in the soil of acceptance, not in the atmosphere of rejection

Human beings, like plants, grow in the soil of acceptance, not in the atmosphere of rejection