A Calendar of Wisdom

Happiness is a thing which a person wishes only for himself, goodness is a thing which a person wishes for himself and for others. Happiness can be achieved by struggle; goodness, on the contrary, by being humble.

Real goodness is to serve God.

You should do goodness without choosing to whom. Good things, once done, will never disappear, even if you forget about them. There is only one way to be happy, and this is a sure way: to do goodness and to share this goodness with others.

Anyone who is engaged in really important things is very simple because he does not have time to create unnecessary things.

Every desire abates, and every vice grows after it is satisfied.

Every new desire is the beginning of a new wish, the beginning of a new madness.

Pleasure, luxury - these things you call happiness, but I think that to wish nothing is the happiness of God, and when you wish to have only small things, then you make yourself closer to this divine and high happiness.

Nature requires small things; the existing law requires many excessive things.

People can live without need and without jealousy only when they lead a life of moderation.

A fruitful prayer is the establishment in your conscious mind of the understanding of life’s meaning, and you can experience this state during the best minutes of your life.

Prayer is understood as an inner formal religious service, a service to ask and achieve some compassion for yourself from the higher force; this is a misconception. On the other hand, the desire of our heart to please God with all our actions - this is the spirit of real prayer which should always exist in us.

One hour of honest, serious thinking is more precious than weeks spent in empty talks.

You should pray every hour. The most necessary and the most difficult form of prayer is to remember—in spite of the numerous distractions of life—your obligations to God, to his law. You become scared, you become upset, you become embarrassed, you become too involved or distracted by something. But you should always remember who you are and what you should do. This is what a real prayer should be about. This is difficult in the beginning, but with time you can work and create this habit.

It is dangerous to disseminate the idea that our life is purely the product of material forces and that it depends entirely on these forces.

There are no people who can more confuse the notions of good and evil than the scholars of our time. Their science makes good progress in the study of the material world, 'but in the inner, spiritual life of humanity, it becomes an unnecessary and sometimes harmful thing.

False science and false religion express their dogmas in highly elevated language to make simple people think that they are mysterious, important, and attractive. But this mysterious language is not a sign of wisdom. The wiser a person is, the simpler the language he uses to express his thoughts.

The teaching about your inner life is the most useful one.

In our time science has started to give diplomas for idleness.

The real purpose of science is the understanding of the truth of this life. Its false purpose is the justification of evil in this world. These are the judicial sciences, political sciences, and especially theology, the science of religion.

If people were completely virtuous, they would never step aside from the truth.

Don’t be afraid of a person in any position, in low or high standing, whether he is a scholar or an ignorant person. If you respect all people, you should love all people, and fear no one.

The consequences of any good thing which you have done in your life will die as soon as you step aside from the truth. The high spirit which lives in you and which is united with you is looking all the time for good and evil.

Truth can be understood only by waiting and watching, and when you get one truth, two more will appear before you.

The truth is harmful only to evildoers. Those who do good love the truth.

People move, inconspicuously but ceaselessly, toward the kingdom of God, which will be achieved by unification in love.

Every single individual person, as well as all mankind together, will change, and will go on to higher stages without-stopping in their development, the limit of which is God himself. And this time is coming.

No, the word of all-powerful God has not been told completely. And his thought has not been understood completely in all its depth. He created and he creates, and he will create, for many eternal centuries after us; this the human mind cannot embrace.

The constant struggle between flesh and spirit will never be finished. This struggle is eternal and the essence of life. The purpose of life is loving, the penetration of everything with love. It is the slow and gradual change from evil to good, it is the creation of the real life, the life filed with love.

The human world is always on the way to perfection, and the understanding of this process of perfection is one of mankind’s biggest joys, and this joy is accessible to every person.

Work is the condition of existence in the material, physical world. If Robinson had not worked, he would have frozen to death and died from hunger, and everybody can see this. So labor is the necessary condition for the spiritual life as well, but not all people can see this clearly, though it is as obvious as the necessity of physical labor for the body.