That's the whole spiritual life. It's learning how to die. And as you learn how to die, you start losing all your illusions, and you start being capable now of true intimacy and love.

A rebirth out of spiritual adversity causes us to become new creatures.

We want spiritual principles to be more than beautiful abstractions; we want them to actually transform our lives.

Nothing happens until something moves.

Student: Dr. Einstein, Aren't these the same questions as last year's [physics] final exam? Dr. Einstein: Yes; But this year the answers are different.

Every theory is killed sooner or later in that way. But if the theory has good in it, that good is embodied and continued in the next theory.

We cannot solve problems with the kind of thinking we employed when we came up with them

Szale?stwo: wykonywanie tej samej czynno?ci bez ko?ca i spodziewanie si?, ?e da to odmienne rezultaty.

We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.

The vast majority of human beings dislike and even actually dread all notions with which they are not familiar... Hence it comes about that at their first appearance innovators have generally been persecuted, and always derided as fools and madmen.

A whole population of strangers inhabited and shaped that little body, lived in that mind and controlled its wishes, dictated its thoughts...The name was an abstraction, a title arbitrarily given, like France or England, to a collection, never long the same, of many individuals who were born, lived, and died within him, as the inhabitants of a country appear and disappear, but keep alive in their passage the identity of the nation to which they belong.

The universal and ever-present urge to self-transcendence is not to be abolished by slamming the current popular Doors in the Wall. The only reasonable policy is to open other, better doors in the hope of inducing men and women to exchange their old habits for new and less harmful ones.