Quotes from Stephen Cope

Every time we discerningly renounce a possession, we free up energy that can be channeled into the pursuit of dharma. Renunciation was never meant to be for its own sake, but for the sake

Like Frost's, our job is to make choices that create the right conditions for dharma to flourish. The Gift is indestructible. It is a seed. We are not required to be God. We are not required to create the seed. Only to plant it wisely and

Every time we discerningly renounce a possession, we free up energy that can be channeled into the pursuit of dharma. Renunciation was never meant to be for its own sake, but for the sake of dharma.

Donald Goellnicht. The Poet-Physician: Keats and Medical Science. University of Pittsburgh Press: Pittsburgh, 1984

Women living in America in the mid-1800s were the legal property of their husbands. A married woman had no right to property, no right to buy and sell real estate in her own name, no right to bequeath any property whatsoever to an heir. A married woman of the time had no right even to her own children. And, needless to say, she had no right to the vote.

Andrew Motion. Keats. University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 2001

I was not made for man," Anthony would later declare flatly. "I was made for God. And I was made for myself.

Live only in your art," he wrote in his diary, "for you are so limited by your senses. This is nevertheless the only existence for you.

If you bring forth what is within you it will save you. Yes.

Abandon all supports," says Krishna to Arjuna in one of his great final teachings. "Cast off your dependency on everything external, Arjuna, and rely on the Self alone." We work first because we have to work. Then because we want to work. Then because we love to work. Then the work simply does us. Difficult at the beginning. Inevitable at the end.

I must concentrate all of my energies on the enfranchisement of my own sex! She had named and claimed her calling. Here is concentration of purpose. This declaration, as we shall see, unified her energy in extraordinary ways.

He saw that true living was living for the sake of others. He was freed from the bondage of his awkward, inept, fearful self.

Kay R. Jamison. Touched with Fire. Free Press: New York, 1996

When you know who you are, you will know how to act.

My life does not belong to me." Chardin would have said, "My life belongs to God." Katherine found it closer to the truth to say, "My life belongs to the world.

self-dedication is too small a work. It inevitably becomes a prison.

Free from self-will, aggressiveness, arrogance, anger, and the lust to possess people or things, he is at peace with himself and others and enters into the unitive state. United with Brahman, ever joyful, beyond the reach of desire and sorrow, he has

Duncan B. Forrester, James Ian Hamilton McDonald, Gian Tellini. Encounter with God. T. T. Clark International: NY, 2004

When [God] is moving you toward a new consciousness, you need to recognize the winds of change at once, move with them instead of clinging to what is already gone.

Each of us must find the form that allows this naming, this working through, and, finally, this mastery. We may find these forms in sports, in the arts, in finance, in academia, in relationship building, in child-rearing—or, indeed, in stamp collecting. But find them we must.

primary distortion in my dharma life has been the age-old misery of self-absorption.

Geoffrey C. Ward. Not for Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony—An Illustrated History. Knopf: New York, 1999.

Initiations are opportunities for us to grow larger. They are death channels. And they are birth channels. They allow us the opportunity to integrate more of our self—more possibility, more reality, more sensation, more feeling. They require everything we've got. They destroy us to re-create us.

The Tao te Ching says, "[The Master] doesn't glitter like a jewel Ã¢â'¬Â¦ [but is] as rugged and common as a stone.