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M Quotes

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All M Quotes

“Man is an evasive beast, given to cultivating strange notions about himself. He is humiliated by his simian ancestry, and tries to deny his animal nature, to persuade himself that he is not limited by its weaknesses nor concerned in its fate. And this impulse may be harmless, when it is genuine. But what are we to say when we see the formulas of heroic self-deception made use of by unheroic self-indulgence?”

“Man is an onion made up of a hundred integuments, a texture made up of many threads. The ancient Asiatics knew this well enough, and in the Buddhist Yoga an exact technique was devised for unmasking the illusion of the personality. The human merry-go-round sees many changes: the illusion that cost India the efforts of thousands of years to unmask is the same illusion that the West has labored just as hard to maintain and strengthen.”

“Man is appealed to be guided in his acts, not merely by love, which is always personal, or at best tribal, but by his perception of his oneness with each human being. In the practice of mutual aid, which we can re-trace to the earliest beginnings of evolution, we thus find the positive and undoubted origin of our ethical conceptions; and we can affirm that in the ethical progress of man, mutual support- not mutual struggle- has had the leading part.”

“Man is, as it were, a centre, and is attracting all the powers of the universe towards himself, and in this centre is fusing them all and again sending them off in a big current. Such a centre is the real man—the almighty, the omniscient—and he draws the whole universe towards him. Good and bad, misery and happiness, all are running towards him and clinging round him; and out of them he fashions the mighty stream of tendency called character and throws it outwards. As he has the power of drawing in anything, so has he the power of throwing it out.”

“Man is at his furthest remove from the animal as a child, his intellect most human. With his fifteenth year and puberty he comes astep closer to the animal; with the sense of possessions of his thirties (the median line between laziness and greediness), still another step. In his sixtieth year of life he frequently loses his modesty as well, then the septuagenarian steps up to us as a completely unmasked beast: one need only look at the eyes and the teeth.”

“Man is born an asocial and antisocial being. The newborn child is a savage. Egoism is his nature. Only the experience of life and the teachings of his parents, his brothers, sisters, playmates, and later of other people FORCE HIM to acknowledge the advantages of social cooperation and accordingly to change his behavior.”

“Man is born as a freak of nature, being within nature and yet transcending it. He has to find principles of action and decision-making which replace the principles of instincts. He has to have a frame of orientation which permits him to organize a consistent picture of the world as a condition for consistent actions. He has to fight not only against the dangers of dying, starving, and being hurt, but also against another danger which is specifically human: that of becoming insane. In other words, he has to protect himself not only against the danger of losing his life but also against the danger of losing his mind.”

“Man is born as a seed, but most people die as seeds. They never find the right soil to grow and reach their potential. They never find a gardener. They take themselves for granted. They think that whatsoever they are that is the end, but this is not the end. It is only the beginning. But most people live in this way. They never search for their potential. They never become explorers of their inner world. The seed can become a tree. The tree will dance in the wind, in the rain and in the sun. Birds will make their nest in it. People will rest underneath its shade. And when a tree has beauty, form, flowers and joy there is great contentment in the very being of the tree.  It has fulfilled its mission from seed to become a tree. The same experience happens to man when his seed becomes bliss. His seed has reached its potential, because bliss is the highest state of consciousness. He may live on the earth, but he is no more part of the earth. He belongs to the beyond. He may still be in the body, but he is no more the body. He is a buddha. He is pure awareness. Now he knows his immortality. Now he knows that he was never born and he will never die. Bodies come and go, but the innermost core remains. Knowing this all fear disappears. For the first time you start experiencing life at its highest level. At the deepest core of his being, there is only joy.”