Isabelle Eberhardt Quotes

Catastrophe is the essence of the spiritual path, a series of breakdowns allowing us to discover the threads that weave all of life into a whole cloth.

The moving toward one's inner self is a long pilgrimage for a painter. It offers many temporary successes and high points, but impels him on toward the more adequate image.

What gives life its value if not its constant cry for self-transcendence?

From this point on, she whispered, we will either find or lose our souls.

The dark night of the soul comes just before revelation.

Some form of suffering often brings about a readiness. One can say it cracks open the shell of the egoic mind with which many people identify as "me." Life cracks open that shell, and once that crack is there, then we are reached more easily by spiritual teaching.

I close my eyes and I take a deep breath and I think about my life and how I ended up this way. I think about the ruin, devastation and wreckage I have caused to myself and to others. I think about self-hatred and self-loathing. I think about how and why and what happened and the thoughts come easily, but the answers don't.

The true secret of spiritual strength is self-distrust and deep humilty.

I was just struggling with my inner vachette and pondering the depths of my own inhumanity.

I always take a close look at those who lose themselves in self portraits. They are solitary souls, prone to introspection, who have really grappled with their existence.

We are bemused and crazed creatures, strangers to our true selves, to one another, and to the spiritual and material world - mad, even, from an ideal standpoint we can glimpse but not adopt.

My advice to you is not to undertake the spiritual path. It is too difficult, too long, and is too demanding. I suggest you ask for your money back, and go home. This is not a picnic. It is really going to ask everything of you. So, it is best not to begin. However, if you do begin, it is best to finish.

What was life asking of me? How could I respond when I didn't know the question?

Most spiritual experiences begin with suffering. They begin with groundlessness. They begin when the rug has been pulled out from under us.

If you want to awaken all of humanity, then awaken all of yourself, if you want to eliminate the suffering in the world, then eliminate all that is negative in yourself. Truly, the greatest gift you have to give is that of your own self-transformation.

In these simple words, Lord, is it I? lies the beginning of wisdom and the pathway to personal conversion and lasting change.

Solitude is the natural dwelling place of truth…It is there you will wrestle. It is there you will be tested by fire and by darkness.

The movement of grace toward gratitude brings us from the package of self-obsessed madness to a spiritual awakening.

The idea of suicide, understandable as it is, does not seem commendable to me. We live in order to gain the greatest possible amount of spiritual development and self-awareness. As long as life is possible, even if only in a minimal degree, you should hang onto it, in order to scoop it up for the purpose of conscious development. To interrupt life before its time is to bring to a standstill an experiment which we have not set up. We have found ourselves in the midst of it and must carry it through to the end.

As we refine, our checks become finer. If we rise to spiritual culture, the antagonism takes a spiritual form.

Meditation is like the cloak of the good thief. You find a corner or somewhere where you can actually entertain your own self and your own soul, and understand what your work [is] here.

How sickness enlarges the dimension of a man’s self to himself!

A spiritual person tries less to be godly than to be deeply human.

The real you is on the side of God against the false self

Solitude is the furnace of transformation. Without solitude we remain victims of our society and continue to be entangled in the illusions of the false self.