Best be yourself, imperial, plain, and true.

“Too much consistency is as bad for the mind as it is for the body. Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead. Consistent intellectualism and spirituality may be socially valuable, up to a point; but they make, gradually, for individual death. And individual death, when the slow murder has been consummated, is finally social death. So that the social utility of pure intellectualism and pure spirituality is only apparent and temporary. What is needed is, as ever, a compromise. Life must be lived in different ways at different moments. The only satisfactory way of existing in the modern, highly specialized world is to live with two personalities.”

“Pure truth could burst the world apart.”

A considerable percentage of the people we meet on the street are people who are empty inside, that is, they are actually already dead. It is fortunate for us that we do not see and do not know it. If we knew what a number of people are actually dead and what a number of these dead people govern our lives, we should go mad with horror.

No exoteric teaching is capable of providing true knowledge, which man must find only within himself, for in fact no knowledge can be acquired except through a personal comprehension. Without this comprehension, no teaching can lead to an effective result, and the teaching that awakens no personal resonance in the one who receives it cannot give any kind of knowledge. This is why plato says that 'everything that a man learns is already within him'. All the experiences, all the external things that surround him, are only an occasion to help him become aware of what is within himself. This awakening he calls anamnesis, which signifies 'recollection'.

“He alone is great and happy who fills his own station of independence, and has neither to command nor to obey.”

The ultimate definition of bravery is not being afraid of who you are.

“We have placed too much hope in political and social reforms, only to find out that we were being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life.”

“Withdraw into yourself and look. And if you do not find yourself beautiful yet, act as does the creator of a statue that is to be made beautiful: he cuts away here, he smoothes there, he makes this line lighter, this other purer, until a lovely face has grown upon his work.”