A Calendar of Wisdom

Life’s essence lies, not in your body, but in your conscience.

The divine spark lives in all of us, and perpetually strives toward its origin.

When you see that everything around you is impermanent, then you will perceive other, permanent and eternal things.

You cannot see the soul, but only the soul can truly see the essence of things.

I call spirit that part of man which has independent existence and gives us the understanding of life.

Let your spiritual side guide your material side, and not the other way around. In order to improve his state, a person should strive for spiritual not physical perfection.

Nothing can enlighten people’s lives and ease their burdens more than the understanding that they should serve God.

Religious disbelief and neglect is a great evil, but prejudice and lies are even worse.

Life is short. Do not forget about the most important things in our life, living for other people and doing good for them.

Pay goodness for evil. We should be like trees that give fruits to those who throw stones at them. You should accept yourself, not as a master, but as a servant, and then all your bad feelings, your anxiety, alarm, uncertainty, and dissatisfaction will be changed into calmness and peace. You will be filled inside with a clear vision of your purpose, and with a great joy.

All good things can be achieved only with effort.

Bad things are easy to do, good things are done only with work and effort.

The way to true knowledge does not go through soft grass covered with flowers. To find it, a person must climb steep mountains.

Look for the truth; it wants to be found.

A person cries out from pain when he takes up hard physical work after a period of idleness. Any rest from the struggle for spiritual improvement brings the same pain.

The most important and necessary expression of freedom is to give your thought a specific direction.

Work toward the purification of your thoughts. Without bad thoughts you will be incapable of bad deeds.

Everything is in heaven’s power, except for our choice of whether to serve God or ourselves.

We cannot prevent birds from flying over our heads, but we can keep them from making nests on top of our heads. Similarly, bad thoughts sometimes appear in our mind, but we can choose whether we allow them to live there, to create a nest for themselves, and to breed evil deeds.

It is a sin, not only to do bad things, but even to think about bad things.

Faith in the existence of eternity is our exclusively human quality.

The soul does not live in the body as in a house, but as in a tent, a place of temporary dwelling.

Who brought me into this world? According to whose command do I find myself at this exact place, during this particular time? Life is the remembrance of a very short day we spent visiting this world.

Mortal people cannot live long; we have only a few moments. But our soul does not age. It believes in eternal things, and it will live for all eternity.

Death is the destruction of the bodily organs with which I see my world during my life; the destruction of the glass through which I look at this world. The destruction of this glass does not mean the destruction of the eye itself.

Our understanding of eternity is the voice of God who lives within us.

No matter how big mankind’s store of knowledge seems to me in comparison with our previous ignorance, it is only an infinitely small part of all possible knowledge.

Socrates did not have the weakness of many scholars, the desire to know about all possible things, to learn the origins and explanations of things - what the Sophists call “the nature of things” - and to uncover the origins of the celestial bodies. Socrates said, “Is it true that people are so concerned with these earthly things? People wrongly think that they should know everything. They think that they can despise the most necessary and important fields of knowledge, and penetrate the mysteries that do not belong to us.”

Not only is real science not hostile to religion, in fact real science always supports it.

Knowledge is limitless, and the most scholarly and educated person is as far from true knowledge as an uneducated peasant.