Nothing is more important than truth. It is the basis of all right relationship. Without it, we live in delusion.
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Nationalism is the crucible of warfare, and its ally in violence is religion. Parents condition their children to be adherents of such systems of ideas, and the innocent children of today thus become the killers of human beings tomorrow, for the sake of their ideas.
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If the pursuit of riches impoverishes your character, your gains amount to a loss for the world; for not more such rich men, but more good men, is what the world needs.
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The poorest man of all is he who is valued by others only for his money.
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He who nourishes his ego starves his soul, and decays on the inside while his persona flourishes on the outside.
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Your identity is fiction. It is nothing but the projection of memory, the past continually resuscitated; it does not exist in the present, and it never has. When you see the truth of this, you will understand at once that the bare fact of your existence as a life form is of ineffable significance.
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If your behavior demonstrates the absence of morals, your religion, if you profess to have one, is nothing but a cloak of deceit, your way of life a lie, and you yourself a fraud.
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The presence of arrogance is the surest sign of the absence of intelligence.
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Lying is worse than devious when its sole application is to conceal malice.
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A society that fails to engage its children in edifying pursuits will come to lack cohesion through turpitude; and a society that lacks cohesion lacks strength, and will be bound to fall from its weakness to stand.
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Enlightenment is an explosion of awareness that obliterates thought and leaves one with the understanding that the observer is the observed, and it is at that very moment that nationalism dies and one becomes a citizen of the world.
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The same religion that gives an individual solace gives him strife at the same time, because it pits him against his neighbor, who solaces himself with a different religion, the result being that neither has any solace in reality, but only strife.
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We give love existence by abandoning our desires for the benefit of others.
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Wisdom is not a summit, but an endless slope, one which is ascended through intelligent inquiry, observation, investigation, and analysis. As one ascends, understanding grows.
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Empathy is the very foundation of civilization; for without empathy, we are uncivilized.
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The vain person has no self-knowledge; for self-knowledge eradicates vanity.
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Our ideas of reality blind us to reality, because reality exists only in the present, and our ideas come from the past, from memory. To see what is in front of you, do not look behind you. You cannot see the new through the lens of the old.
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Our ability to discern motion or movement cannot exist without the use of memory; for, to discern the movement of a thing now arriving in position b, one must be informed by memory that it was formerly in position a. This measuring by memory creates our perception of time, as well as our perception of the center from which the measuring seems to take place. When memory comes to rest completely, no measuring occurs, time stands still, the center of perception disappears and along with it all division, and awareness of the synchronous movement of all things at once–‘atoms’ swinging and dancing–occurs. Awareness remains because memory in action, or thought, does not produce it.
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The racist invariably betrays his racism to stem ultimately from fear; and though he may masquerade as a strong man, he in fact is a weak one, ruled by fear. Otherwise, he would not be a racist.
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Fanaticism is evidence of mental imbalance; for it is at one end of a spectrum.
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The strongest are not those who can hold on with the greatest strength, but those who can let go with the greatest ease.
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All matter is one continuum of energy, with conglomerations of atoms and molecules making up the infinitude of various objects existing in its field.
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Good judgement is priceless, because it is so rare.