Quotes About Journey

The madman runs to the East and his keeper runs to the East, both are running to the East. Their purposes differ.

The birth of a man is the birth of his sorrow.

Therefore there is only one problem on which all my existence, my peace and my happiness depend: to discover myself in discovering God. If I find Him I will find myself and if I find my true self I will find Him. But

It is easy to stand still and leave no trace, but it is hard to walk without touching the ground. (p. 53)

It was when Jonas was traveling as fast as he could away from Nineveh, toward Tharsis, that he was thrown overboard, and swallowed by a whale who took him where God wanted him to go.

Si ascendero in coelum, tu illic es. Si descendero in infernum, ades.

No one can find God without having first been found by Him. A monk is a man who seeks God because he has been found by God.

Let this be the ending of the book but by no means the end of the searching.

In one sense we are always travelling, and travelling as if we did not know where we were going. In another sense we have already arrived.

JMJT February 1, 1942. Septuagesima.

look for Him unless we have already found Him, and we cannot find Him unless he has first found us. We cannot begin to seek Him without a special gift of His grace, yet if we wait for grace to move us, before beginning to seek Him will probably never begin.

If you found God with great ease, perhaps it's not God that you have found.

suffering the inner struggle and the crisis through which one generally comes to a deeper spiritual awakening.

It is not humility to insist on being someone that you are not. It is as much as saying that you know better than God who you are and who you ought to be. How do you expect to arrive at the end of your own journey if you take the road to another mans city? How do you expect to reach your own perfection by leading somebody else's life?

Perhaps the book of life, in the end, is the book of what one has lived and if one has lived nothing, he is not in the book of life.

Gnostic tales tell of the homesickness of the soul, its yearning for its own milieu…

Your first task is to find the place where your soul is at home.

To be religious even in a personal way, you have to wake up and find your own portals to wonder and transcendence.

You can only cruse the boulevards of regret so far, and then you've got to get back up onto the freeway again.

There are stories, like maps that agree... too consistent among too many languages and histories to be only wishful thinking.... It is always a hidden place, the way into it is not obvious, the geography is as much spiritual as physical. If you should happen upon it, your strongest certainty is not that you have discovered it but returned to it. In a single great episode of light, you remember everything.

You can only cruise the boulevards of regret so far, and then you've got to get back up onto the freeway again.

For me, Shambhala, you see, turned out to be not a goal but an absence. Not the discovery of a place but the act of leaving the futureless place where I was. And in the process I arrived at Constantinople.

You are off on a winding and difficult road, which you conceive to be wide and straight, an Autobahn you can travel at your ease. Is it any use for me to tell you that all you believe real is illusion? I don't know whether you'll listen, or ignore it. You only want to know about your path, your Autobahn.

Could we have been so much in the midst of life? With such a sense of grand adventure about it all?