Paul Brunton Quotes

Righteousness cannot be born until self-righteousness is dead.

Those who think that they have arrived, have lost their way. Those who think they have reached their goal, have missed it. Those who think they are saints, are demons.

Self-improvement is a dangerous form of vanity.

The egocentric is always frustrated, simply because the condition of self-perfection is self-surrender. There must be a willingness to die to the lower part of self, before there can be a birth to the nobler.

The disease we all have and that we have to fight against all our lives is ... the disease of self.

The ego promotes turmoil because it wants to substantiate your separateness from everyone, including God. It will push you in the direction of judgment and comparison, and cause you to insist on being right and best. You know your highest self by listening to the voice that only wants you to be at peace.

If you wish to shine like day, burn up the night of self-existence. Dissolve in the Being who is everything.

In martial arts, the biggest enemy is self. Inside you struggle because you want to prove something.

The martial arts are ultimately self-knowledge. A punch or a kick is not to knock the hell out of the guy in front, but to knock the hell out of your ego, your fear, or your hang-ups.

What is needed is the constant unmasking of ego's strategy.

Instead of looking outside of ourselves and counting potential enemies, fasting summons us to turn our glance inward, and to take the measure of our greatest challenge: the self, the ego, in our own eyes and as others see us.

Problems do not go away. They must be worked through or else they remain, forever a barrier to the growth and development of the spirit.

Our holiness is an effect, not a cause; so long as our eyes are on our own personal whiteness as an end in itself, the thing breaks down.

I think I could go away tomorrow. I've already accomplished something. It's such a selfish business that sometimes I get sick of myself.

Pride is a thing that I have tried to abandon completely. Try as I might, pride still creeps into many of the things I do.

I'm getting stronger as a person, but sometimes I just need to get over myself!

The experience of the self is always a defeat for the ego.

The self says, I am; The heart says, I am less; The spirit says, you are Nothing.

There are three conditions which often look alike Yet differ completely, flourish in the same hedgerow: Attachment to self and to things and to persons, detachment From self and from things and from persons; and, growing between them, indifference, ... .

The better you understand yourself the less cause you will find to love yourself.

If anyone makes himself his own master in the spiritual life, he makes himself scholar to a fool.

Self-denial does not belong to religion as characteristic of it; it belongs to human life; the lower nature must always be denied when you are trying to rise to a higher sphere.

No sickness worse than imagining thyself to be perfect can afflict thy soul.

My greatest strength is to have a great capacity to confront myself no matter how unpleasant. My greatest weakness is that I don't. I know that's enigmatic, but that's sort of a general formula for anyone, actually.