Quotes About Inner

We seek retreats for ourselves, houses in the country, seashores, mountains. But . . . we have in our power to retire into ourselves. For there is no retreat that is quieter and freer from trouble than our soul . . . perfect tranquility, the right ordering of mind. —Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

The night was a time for bestial affinities, for drawing closer to oneself.

Each person carries around in himself a terrible other world of hell and the unknown. It is an enormous pit reaching below the deepest crater of the earth, or it is the thinnest air far beyond the moon. But it is frightening and essentially "unlike" man as he knows himself familiarly, so we spend all our days living at the other antipodes of ourself.

The anxiety has always been within himself, a battle of himself against himself, so tortuous he might have welcomed the law's intervention.

The goddess path is within you. To walk it, you must develop your inner resources and strengths. Information and insights will come to you from others. Evaluate them in light of the truths of your own heart. For that is where she lives, even when you forget to look for her. She is always there, providing the love and strength and power you need. Look for her there, and you will always find her.

Obviously, circumstances alone do not make us happy or unhappy. It is the way we react to circumstances that determines our feelings. Jesus said that the kingdom of heaven is within you. That is where the kingdom of hell is, too.

If I lost all five of my senses, I know I could live on inside my mind. For it is in the mind we see, and in the mind we live, whether we know it or not.

Aqueles que mantêm a paz interior em meio ao tumulto da cidade moderna são imunes a doenças nervosas.

Actions are not impostions on who we are, but are expressions of who we are. They come out of our heart and the inner realities it supervises and interacts with

Genuine transformation of the whole person into the goodness and power seen in Jesus and his "Abba" Father—the only transformation adequate to the human self—remains the necessary goal of human life. But it lies beyond the reach of programs of inner transformation that draw merely on the human spirit—even when the human spirit is itself treated as ultimately divine.

There are no formulas—no definitive how-tos—for growth in the inner character of Jesus. Such growth is a way of relentless seeking. But there are many things we can do to place ourselves at the disposal of God, and "if with all our hearts we truly seek him, we shall surely find him

The revolution of Jesus is in the first place and continuously a revolution of the human heart or spirit. It did not and does not proceed by means of the formation of social institutions and laws, the outer forms of our existence, intending that these would then impose a good order of life upon people who come under their power. Rather, his is a revolution of character, which proceeds by changing people from the inside through ongoing personal relationship to God in Christ and to one another.

The most constant "whim," historically, has been the disastrous idea just mentioned: that Jesus is here giving laws. For if that is all he is doing, they will certainly be laws that are impossible to keep. The keeping of law turns out to be an inherently self-refuting aim; rather, the inner self must be changed. Trying merely to keep the law is not wholly unlike trying to make an apple tree bear peaches by tying peaches to its branches.

That spiritual place within us from which outlook, choices, and actions come has been formed by a world away from God. Now it must be transformed.

Yet, without this realization of our utter ruin and without the genuine revisioning and redirecting of our lives, which that bitter realization naturally gives rise to, no clear path to inner transformation can be found. It is psychologically and spiritually impossible.

the focus of spiritual formation is the formation of our spirit.

We live from our depths—most of which we do not understand. "Do

emotions are not amoral—they vocalize the inner working of our souls and are as tainted as any other portion of our personality.

change comes through brutal honesty and vulnerability before God. Only face to face with our deepest ruling passions is there hope of redeeming the fabric of our inner world.

Truth has power. And if we all gravitate toward similar ideas, maybe we do so because those ideas are true...written deep within us. And when we hear the truth, even if we don't understand it, we feel that truth resonate within us...vibrating with our unconscious wisdom. Perhaps the truth is not learned by us, but rather, the truth is re-called...re-membered...-re-cognized...as that which is already inside us.

It's the age-old battle between mind and heart, which seldom want the same thing.

Inner calm is critical to persuasive acting.

Abandon the search for God... instead, take yourself as the starting place.

La calma interior es decisiva para una actuación convincente.