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“Your ideas about yourself change from day to day and from moment to moment. Your self image is the most changeful thing you have. It is utterly vulnerable, at the mercy of a passerby. A bereavement, the loss of a job, an insult, and your image of yourself, which you call your person, changes deeply. To know what you are, you must first investigate and know what you are not. And to know what you are not, you must watch yourself carefully, rejecting all that does not necessarily go with the basic fact: “I am.” Our usual attitude is of “I am this.” Consistently and perseveringly separate the “I am” from “this” or “that” and try to feel what it means to be, without being “this” or “that.” All our habits go against it and the task of fighting them is long and hard sometimes, but clear understanding helps significantly. The more clearly you understand that on the level of the mind you can be described in negative terms only, the more quickly you will come to the end of your search and realize your limitless being.”
― Nisargadatta Maharaj, I Am That: Talks with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

“Trust no friend without faults, and love a woman, but no angel.”
― Doris Lessing

“Happiness is never your own; it is where the ‘I’ is not. It is beyond your reach; you have only to reach out beyond yourself and you will find it.”
― Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, I am that

“The mind will be still if there’s no warfare, but there’s always warfare if you have two powers, if you have good and evil, if you have desires, if you struggle to attain or achieve something.”
― Joel S. Goldsmith, The Foundation of Mysticism