The transition from tenseness, self-responsibility, and worry, to equanimity, receptivity, and peace, is the most wonderful of all those shiftings of inner equilibrium, those changes of personal centre of energy, which I have analyzed so often; and the chief wonder of it is that it so often comes about, not by doing, but by simply relaxing and throwing the burden down.

Compared to what we ought to be, we are half awake.

Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system

Most people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They make very small use of their possible consciousness, and of their soul's resources in general, much like a man who, out of his whole bodily organism, should get into a habit of using and moving only his little finger.

Despair lames most people, but it wakes others fully up.

Most men's friendships are too inarticulate.

Pessimism leads to weakness. Optimism leads to power.