However you may be, be your own source of experience. Throw off your discontent about your nature. Forgive yourself, your own self. You have it in your power to merge everything you have lived through; false starts, errors, delusions, passions, your loves and your hopes into your goal with nothing left over.
The first thought of the day. The best way to begin each day well is to think upon awakening whether we could not give at least one person pleasure on this day.
Give up defining yourself - to yourself or to others. You won’t die. You will come to life. And don’t be concerned with how others define you. When they define you, they are limiting themselves, so it’s their problem. Whenever you interact with people, don’t be there primarily as a function or a role, but as the field of conscious Presence. You can only lose something that you have, but you cannot lose something that you are.
- Eckhart Tolle (A New Earth)
Wisdom, Happiness, and Courage are not waiting somewhere out beyond sight at the end of a straight line; they’re part of a continuous cycle that begins right here. They’re not only the ending, but the beginning as well.
So act that you use humanity, as much in your own person as in the person of every other, always at the same time as an end and never merely as a means.
Humans are not objects to be used by God or a government or corporation or society. Nor we to be “adjusted” or molded into roles —to be only a waiter or a conductor or a mother or worker. We must look deeper than our roles and find ourselves.
Love is a distinguishing of the two, who nevertheless are absolutely not distinguished for each other. The consciousness or feeling of the identity of the two - to be outside of myself and in the other. This is love. I have my self-consciousness not in myself but in the other. I am satisfied and have peace with myself only in this other and I AM only because I have peace with myself; if I did not have it then I would be a contradiction that falls to pieces. This other, because it likewise exists outside itself, has its self-consciousness only in me; and both the other and I are only this consciousness of being-outside-ourselves and if our identity; we are only this intuition, feeling, and knowledge of our unity. This is love, and without knowing that love is both a distinguishing and the sublation of this distinction, one speaks emptily of it.
- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (via mindfulpleasures)
