Lilith

A man is as free as he chooses to make himself, never an atom freer.

Whose work is it but your own to open your eyes? But indeed the business of the universe is to make such a fool out of you that you will know yourself for one, and begin to be wise.

You doubt because you love truth.

Doubt may be a poor encouragement to do anything, but it is a bad reason for doing nothing.

there is no harm in being afraid. The only harm is in doing what Fear tells you. Fear is not your master! Laugh in his face and he will run away.

I tell you, there are more worlds, and more doors to them, than you will think of in many years!

There is no slave but the creature that wills against its Creator.

The part of the philanthropist is indeed a dangerous one; and the man who would do his neighbour good must first study how not to do him evil, and must begin by pulling the beam out of his own eye.

But there is a light that goes deeper than the will, a light that lights up the darkness behind it: that light can change your will, can make it truly yours and not another's - not the Shadow's. Into the created can pour itself the creating will, and so redeem it!

The only way to come to know where you are is to begin to make yourself at home.

Those are not the tears of repentance!... Self-loathing is not sorrow. Yet it is good, for it marks a step in the way home, and in the father's arms the prodigal forgets the self he abominates.

I am ready,' I replied. 'How do you know you can do it?' 'Because you require it,' I answered.

Thou art beautiful because God created thee, but thou art a slave to sin... wickedness has made you ugly.

I looked, and saw: before her, cast from an unseen heavenly mirror, stood the reflection of herself, and beside it a form of splendent beauty. She trembled, and sank again on the floor helpless. She knew the one that God had intended her to be, the other that she had made herself.

Books are but dead bodies to you, and a library nothing but a catacomb!

When a man dreams his own dream, he is the sport of his dream; when Another gives it him, that Other is able to fulfill it.

...I am still librarian in your house, for I never was dismissed, and never gave up the office. Now I am librarian here as well.' 'But you have just told me you were sexton here!' 'So I am. It is much the same profession. Except you are a true sexton, books are but dead bodies to you, and a library nothing but a catacomb!

I had chosen the dead rather than the living, the thing thought rather than the thing thinking.

Yes,' he answered; 'and you will be dead, so long as you refuse to die.

No one can say he is himself, until first he knows that he is, and then what himself is. In fact, nobody is himself, and himself is nobody.

All the days of my appointed time will I wait till my change come.

The man who grounds his action on another's cowardice, is essentially a coward himself.

Nobody knows what anything is; a man can only learn what a thing means!

It opened a little way, and a face came into the opening. It was Lona's. It's eyes were closed, but the face itself was upon me, and seemed to see me. It was as white as Eve's, white as Mara's, but did not shine like their faces. She spoke, and her voice was like a sleepy night-wind in the grass. "Are you coming, king?" it said. "I cannot rest until you are with me, gliding down the river to the great sea, and the beautiful dream-land. The sleepiness is full of lovely things: come and see them.

You allowed me existence, which is the sum of what one can demand of his fellow-beings

If you know you are yourself, you know that you are not somebody else; but do you know that you are yourself? Are

Strange dim memories, which will not abide identification, often, through misty windows of the past, look out upon me in the broad daylight, but I never dream now. It may be, notwithstanding, that, when most awake, I am only dreaming the more! But when I wake at last into that life which as a mother her child, carries life in its bosom, I shall know that I wake, and shall doubt no more. I wait; asleep or awake, I wait.

Every one, as you ought to know, has a beast-self—and a bird-self, and a stupid fish-self, ay, and a creeping serpent-self too—which it takes a deal of crushing to kill! In truth he has also a tree-self and a crystal-self, and I don’t know how many selves more—all to get into harmony. You can tell what sort a man is by his creature that comes oftenest to the front.

Oblige me by telling me where I am." "That is impossible. You know nothing about whereness. The only way to come to know where you are is to begin to make yourself at home.

No man knows it when he is making an idiot of himself.