20 Great Quotes of Wisdom to Awaken Your Inner Mystic

Have you ever stood inside a great cathedral, temple, or monastery — surrounded by architecture, paintings, and sculpture depicting the saints and mystics of a bygone time — and felt that whatever produced those works must have come from an even greater inspiration?

You don't have to be religious to feel it. The mystic path brings out the highest possibility in the human spirit. Below are twenty short quotes — each one a doorway, if you let it be one.

A note on how to read these

These aren't aphorisms to be agreed with and forgotten. The traditional way to use such phrases is to sit with one for a day, a week, or a season. Let it work on you. Let your life answer it.

| Tradition | Number of quotes | Pages they tend to fall on | | --- | ---: | --- | | Sufi & Persian | 4 | 1, 6, 11, 18 | | Zen & Mahayana | 5 | 2, 7, 12, 14, 19 | | Christian mystical | 4 | 3, 8, 13, 20 | | Hindu & Vedic | 4 | 4, 9, 15, 17 | | Hellenic / Western | 3 | 5, 10, 16 |

The twenty quotes

1. "The words that enlighten the soul are more precious than jewels."

— Hazrat Inayat Khan, Sufi mystic

2. "The whole order of nature evinces a progressive march towards a higher life."

— Helena Blavatsky, theosophist

3. "Above the cloud with its shadow is the star with its light. Above all things reverence thyself."

— Pythagoras, Greek philosopher

4. "If you cannot find the truth within yourself, where else do you expect to find it?"

— Dōgen, Zen master

5. "When you know who you are; when your mission is clear and you burn with the inner fire of unbreakable will; no cold can touch your heart, no deluge can dampen your purpose."

— Paramahansa Yogananda

6. "Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I'll meet you there."

— Rumi

7. "Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom. Mastering others is strength; mastering yourself is true power."

— Lao Tzu

8. "What we are looking for is what is looking."

— Saint Francis of Assisi

9. "The mind is everything. What you think, you become."

— Buddha

10. "The unexamined life is not worth living."

— Socrates

11. "Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it."

— Rumi

12. "When you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you."

— Lao Tzu

13. "All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well."

— Julian of Norwich

14. "If your everyday life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches."

— Rainer Maria Rilke

15. "We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience."

— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

16. "He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how."

— Friedrich Nietzsche

17. "Yoga is the journey of the self, through the self, to the self."

— Bhagavad Gita

18. "Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment."

— Rumi

19. "Before enlightenment: chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment: chop wood, carry water."

— Zen proverb

20. "I am not what happened to me. I am what I choose to become."

— Carl Jung

A simple practice

Pick one. Just one. Write it on a card. Carry it for a week.

Day 1 — read it on waking
Day 2 — let one moment of the day be answered by it
Day 3 — notice what resists it
Day 4 — notice what receives it
Day 5 — write what it has changed
Day 6 — let it be silent
Day 7 — sit with it for a single quiet minute

That's the whole practice. The quote is the seed; your life is the soil.