The Library
That alone is true culture which refines taste, improves character, lifts standards, corrects behaviour, and teaches self-control.
5.6.5.2Listen To become a fuller human being a man must acquire education and culture. Both he and his life will be enriched. But unless he keeps humility, his egoism may grow too.
5.6.5.11Listen Suppose you knew that this was to be your last day on earth. How would you behave towards others? Would you not sink all short-range attitudes and rise above the petty selfishness, the pitiful enmities, and the harsh discords which may have marred your past? Would you not try at least to feel goodwill toward all men? This is how philosophy bids you behave at all times and not merely on your deathbed.
5.6.5.29Listen He is open-eyed enough to see men as they are, but also generous enough to see them as they must one day become.
5.6.5.31Listen As the full meaning of reincarnation and of karma sinks deeper and deeper into his mind, a generous tolerance will rise higher and higher in his feelings. He will begin to see that every wrong-doer is what he is because of his past experience and present mentality and has to act in the way he does and cannot act in any other way...
5.6.5.32,Listen If he practises goodwill to others, it is more likely that the higher power will bestow grace upon him through others.
5.6.5.34Listen The man who is no longer disturbed by the presence or working or characteristic of his own ego will not be disturbed by that of others. No negative feeling will enter his attitude toward them.
5.6.5.42Listen As a man advances in inward development, gaining ever richer experience in fresh embodiments, he comes to see that he will gain more by practising co-operation than by selfishly seeking his own isolated benefit alone.
5.6.5.59Listen Assert the ego aggressively against others and you provoke their egos to assert themselves. Hostility breeds hostility, violence encourages the others to be violent.
5.6.5.67Listen The blood and violence, the fear and suffering associated with the production of meat, should be enough to make kindhearted, sensitive people shun it.
5.6.5.78Listen In his upward climb he should slowly learn to drop the emotional view of life and to replace it by the intelligent view. Thus he will show his passage from a lower to a higher level. But it is to be an intelligence that is serene in activity, impersonal in judgement, warm in benevolence, and intuitive in quality…
5.6.5.125,Listen If you can go to a man you greatly dislike and remember that he, too, will one day discover his spiritual identity and express a finer, more lovable self, it will be easier to be calm, patient, just, and at ease with him.
5.6.5.131Listen Let him accept others as he accepts himself, with all their and his defects, but with the addition that he will constantly aim at improving himself.
5.6.5.141Listen When the actions or words of others provoke us, it is easy to become irritable, resentful, or indignant; it is hard to practise a bland patience and exercise a philosophic tolerance. But that is just what the aspirant must do.
5.6.5.144Listen When it is not possible for his relatives or friends to share with him the acceptance of spiritual ideas, he should be tolerant, understanding, and patient toward such disagreement.
5.6.5.165Listen If anyone or anything, a man or a book, can contribute to free us from the resentments towards others or the bitternesses towards life which poison feelings, thoughts, and health, he has rendered us a great service or the book has proved its worth.
5.6.5.170Listen Where good manners are sincerely felt and sincerely practised, they represent consideration for other people, abandonment of the self-centered habit we are born with. And what does this in turn represent but a surrender of the ego?…
5.6.5.187,Listen Whatever helps to refine character, feeling, mind, and taste is to be welcomed and cultivated as part of the philosophic work.
5.6.5.202Listen … To be a liar and a hypocrite is as obstructive to the pursuit of truth as it is distorting to the reception of truth. Every lie--and even, to a lesser extent, every white lie--obstructs the light on his path and to that extent prevents him from finding his way to that region where the false simply does not and cannot exist…
5.6.5.228,Listen The more speech and thought are kept free from negative statements about other faiths, other teachings, other persons, and other organizations, and the more we practise courtesy and silence in matters where we do not agree with them, the better will it be for our true development.
5.6.5.236Listen If an enemy, a critic, or an opponent accuses him of committing a sin or having a fault, he need not get disquieted over the event nor lose his inner calm nor feel angry and resentful nor retaliate with counter-accusations. Instead he should give it his attention, coolly, to ascertain if there is any foundation for it. In this way he disidentifies himself from the ego.
5.6.5.244Listen If he trains himself in thought control as a means to ego control, then neither flatterers nor critics can reach him with their praise or blame.
5.6.5.248Listen One shouldn't brood over fancied wrongs which he believes have been done to him nor dwell on another's faults. The law of recompense will deal with the situation. Emotional bitterness is harmful to both persons. On this path, the student must learn to overcome such feelings; they act as obstacles which hinder his advancement.
5.6.5.279Listen … He should refrain from giving attention to the imperfections and shortcomings of others, and he should certainly never blame them for these. He should turn his critical gaze towards himself alone--unless he is specifically asked by others to examine them--and exercise it to correct himself and improve himself and reform himself.
5.6.5.283,Listen Why blame a person for what he does if his higher faculties have not yet awakened and possessed him? He is only doing what he can. Moreover it is prudent never to condemn others. For others will then by karmic law condemn you.
5.6.5.284Listen What is the use of reproaching a fly for not being a bird or its inability to travel as far or look as beautiful? Yet this is what they do who deplore others' bad behaviour and spiritual ignorance.
5.6.5.293Listen The student should not go about criticizing or abusing others. He should not do so because it is mentally unhealthy and hinders his own progress, because it will one day bring down criticism or abuse upon his own head, because he has to foster a compassionate outlook, and because he ought to understand that everybody on earth is indeed here owing to his own imperfection …
5.6.5.307,Listen It is stupid to bring into conversation with others beliefs which they are certain to scoff at but which one cherishes as holy.
5.6.5.310Listen The necessity of forgiving others what they have done to us is paramount. Nay, it is a duty to be constantly and unbrokenly practised, no matter what provocation to disobey it we may receive. Our contact with others, or our relation to them, must bring them only good! never bad.
5.6.5.314Listen To the degree you keep ego out of your reaction to an enemy, to that degree you will be protected from him. His antagonism must be met not only with calmness, indifference, but also with a positive forgiveness and active love…
5.6.5.315,Listen …Let him remember those glorious moments when the higher self touched his heart. In these moments all that was noble in him overflowed. Enemies were forgiven, grievances let go and the human scene viewed through the spectacle of tenderness and generosity…
5.6.5.316,Listen Ordinarily it is not easy, not natural, to forgive anyone who has wronged us. The capacity to do so will come to us as understanding grows large enough or as meditation penetrates deep enough or as grace blesses us.
5.6.5.317Listen The moral purification involved in casting out all hatred and granting complete forgiveness opens a door to the Overself's light.
5.6.5.319Listen The true mystic harbours only goodwill towards one who chooses to be his enemy, together with good wishes for the other’s well-being and for his coming closer to the higher self, hence closer to the truth.
5.6.5.321Listen To serve humanity is in the end to serve yourself. This follows from the working of karma. To forgive those who, in ignorance, sin against you is, for the same reason, to forgive yourself.
5.6.5.322Listen In the end the heartlessly cruel punish themselves, though whether here in this life, in purgatory after death, or in some future re-embodiment is another matter.
5.6.5.323Listen Every man whose orbit touches your own is unwittingly your teacher. He has something of value for you, however small it be. Let him perform his mission, then. Do not dim the lesson by covering it with clouds of negative emotion.
5.6.5.344Listen
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