A Calendar of Wisdom

If you love a person without loving God, which is the goodness inside of him, then you plant the seeds for future disappointments and sufferings with this love.

Those who say that they love God but dislike their neighbors are lying to people; those who love their neighbors but don’t love God are lying to themselves.

Only perfection is worth complete love. In order to feel complete love, we can either delude ourselves that some imperfect object of our love is “perfection” or we can love perfection, which is God.

The improvement of society can be achieved only by the moral improvement of individuals.

We live in an epoch of discipline, culture, and civilization, but not in an epoch of morality. In the present state, we can say that the happiness of the people grows, and yet the unhappiness of the people increases as well. How can we make people happy when they are not educated to have high morals? They do not become wise.

There can be only one way to fight the general evil of life: it is in the moral, religious, and spiritual perfection of your own life.

The misfortunes of war and preparations for war bear little relation to the reasons given to explain war: the real reasons are usually so insignificant that they are not even worth discussion, and they are completely unknown to those who die.

The madness of contemporary war is justified by dynastic interest, common nationalism, European equilibrium, or ambitions. If there are ambitions in people, this is a very strange way to sustain it, with all the crimes which happen to people during war: destruction of homes, plunder, and mass murder.

You ask me, is it necessary for civilized people to make war? And I tell you not only is it “already” unnecessary, but it was never necessary, and not sometimes but always it destroys the normal development of humanity, destroys justice, and stops progress.

Only during a period of war does it become obvious how millions of people can be manipulated. People, millions of people, are filled with pride while doing things which those same people actually consider stupid, evil, dangerous, painful, and criminal, and they strongly criticize these things - but continue doing them.

The reasons which governments give for wars are always screens, behind which lie completely different reasons and motives.

Understanding our duty provides us with the understanding of our divine soul. And, too, the understanding of our divine soul gives us the understanding of duty.

There is in our soul something that, if we see it as it is and give it the proper attention, will always give us great pleasure; this something is the moral disposition or quality which was given to us at our creation.

People can reach heavenly joy: those pure ones who are filled with the desire for a good life receive pleasures in their body, in their material life. When your mind and your heart are pure, then the divine will be opened for you.

If your heart is filled with virtue, then you will find happiness and beauty.

The voice of your conscience is the voice of God.

Your conscience is your understanding of your spiritual origins; only when you possess such awareness will it be a real guide in your life.

There are two different beings within you, one which is blind and sensual, and another which can see and is spiritual. This spiritual being is called conscience and can be compared with the needle of a compass which points at goodness at one end, and at the other, evil. We cannot perceive this compass until we stray from goodness, but as soon as we do something bad, then we feel this pull away from the direction of goodness in life.

God gave us the consciousness of mankind as a whole, as well as our own consciousness as individuals; with the help of these two things, as with two wings we can fly higher and come closer to God and to understand the truth.

Oh, conscience: you are the deathless voice of heaven, and a true guide and judge of goodness. You make a person resemble God.

Youth is the time of passions and infatuations, and yet listen now to the voice of your conscience and accept it as the greatest authority. Always ask yourself, do my actions coincide with my conscience? And do not be afraid to arrive at meanings different from other people’s.

Fear all that is not accepted by your conscience.

There was a time when people ate human flesh and found nothing wrong in it; even now there are such wild people. People stopped eating human meat, little by little; now they cease to eat the meat of animals little by little, though it has taken time. But the time will come when people will have the same disgust for the meat of animals as they now have for human flesh.

It is terrible to throw little children to other people as foundlings, to organize gladiators’ fights, to torture prisoners, and to do other such uncivilized deeds. In the future, the time will come when it will be unacceptable to kill animals and take their dead bodies as your food.

Do not raise your hand against your brother, and do not spill the blood of any living creatures who live on this earth, neither human beings nor pets nor wild animals nor birds. In the depth of your soul some divine voice stops you from spilling this blood. There is life in it. You cannot return this life.

In our time, the killing of animals for pleasure or food is almost a crime, and hunting and eating meat are not just trivial things, but bad actions, which like any other bad actions lead to many other actions which are worse.

The misery of the unintellectual life brings us to the need for an intellectual life.

Before, I lived in sin, and I saw that the majority of people around me lived in the same way. Like a robber, I knew I was unhappy and I suffered, and that people around me were unhappy and they suffered; and I didn’t see any way out of this situation except for suicide or death. Life seemed terrible to me. And then I heard the words of Christ and I understood them. And life ceased to seem an evil, and instead of desperation I felt a happiness for life which surpasses even death.

We can understand wisdom in three ways: first, by meditation; this is the most noble way. Secondly, by being influenced by someone or following someone; this is the easiest way. Third is the way of experience; this is the most difficult way.

When you suffer, think not on how you can escape suffering, but concentrate your efforts on what kind of inner moral and spiritual perfection this suffering requires.