Paul Brunton Quotes

#1. Any serious man or woman in search of spiritual ideas will find a surprising challenge and an authentic source of inspiration and intellectual nourishment in the writings of Paul Brunton.

Jacob Needleman

#2. Paul Brunton's Notebooks are a veritable treasure-trove of philosophic-spiritual wisdom.

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

#3. Paul Brunton was a great original and got to a place of personal evolution that illumines the pathways of a future humanity.

Jean Houston

#4. The notebooks of Paul Brunton represent the acme of wisdom on the nature of human spirituality. Every serious student of this subject will profit enormously by becoming acquainted with Brunton's seminal work.

Kenneth Ring

#5. Paul Brunton was surely one of the finest mystical flowers to grow on the wasteland of our secular civilization. What he has to say is important to us all.

Georg Feuerstein

#6. Appetite has really become an artificial and abnormal thing, having taken the place of true hunger, which alone is natural. The one is a sign of bondage but the other, of freedom.

Paul Brunton

#7. Accept the long night patiently, quietly, humbly, and resignedly as intended for your true good. It is not a punishment for sin committed but an instrument of annihilating egoism.

Paul Brunton

#8. Every discussion which is made from an egoistic standpoint is corrupted from the start and cannot yield an absolutely sure conclusion. The ego puts its own interest first and twists every argument, word, even fact to suit that interest.

Paul Brunton

#9. Although the pure truth has never been stated, nevertheless it has never been lost. Its existence does not depend upon human statement but upon human sensitivity. In this it is unlike all other knowledge.

Paul Brunton

#10. The philosophic outlook rises above all sectarian controversy. It finds its own position not only by appreciating and synthesizing what is solidly based in the rival sects but also by capping them all with the keystone of nonduality.

Paul Brunton

#11. The artist must raise the cup of his vision aloft to the gods in the high hope that they will pour into it the sweet mellow wine of inspiration.

Paul Brunton

#12. God needs no worship, no praise, no thanksgiving. It is man himself who needs the benefit to be derived from these activities.

Paul Brunton

#13. You may accept the inevitable with bitterness and resentment or with patience and grace. Mere acceptance is not sufficient.

Paul Brunton

#14. All methods and techniques - and of course all human beings who propound them - are merely instruments to help the student obtain a methodless, technique-free, teacherless state.

Paul Brunton

#15. There is really nothing to be achieved here; only something to be accepted-the fact of your own divinity.

Paul Brunton

#16. While the mind remains so fixed in its own personal affairs, be they little or large, it has no chance to open up its higher levels. When attention and emotion are kept so confined, the chance they offer of this higher use is missed. The peace, truth, and goodness which could be had are untouched.

Paul Brunton

#17. Worry is spiritual short sight. Its cure is intelligent faith.

Paul Brunton

#18. In the end, the final justification of the materialist is not reason, as he so fondly thinks, but mere belief. For it is only by an act of simple faith that he accepts the testimony of sense-experience.

Paul Brunton

#19. Every test successfully met is rewarded by some growth in intuitive knowledge, strengthening of character, or initiation into a higher consciousness.

Paul Brunton

#20. Deep down within the heart there is a stillness which is healing, a trust in the universal laws which is unwavering, and a strength which is rock-like. But because it is so deep we need both patience and perseverance when digging for it.

Paul Brunton

#21. When it seems humanly impossible to do more in a difficult situation, surrender yourself to the inner silence and thereafter wait for a sign of obvious guidance or for a renewal of inner strength.

Paul Brunton

#22. It may be considered folly by common opinion but this refusal to destroy life unnecessarily, this reverence for it, must become a deeply implanted part of his ethical standard.

Paul Brunton

#23. No man who has lived through a temporary spiritual experience is ever likely to forget it. His days will be haunted until he sets out to seek ways and means of repeating it.

Paul Brunton

#24. Peace is a costly privilege-to be fought for, attained and won. It comes only from a conquered mind.

Paul Brunton

#25. Let us accept the invitation, ever-open, from the Stillness, taste its exquisite sweetness, and heed its silent instruction.

Paul Brunton

#26. The Quest not only begins in the heart but also ends there.

Paul Brunton

#27. Such excessive preoccupation with his faults is not a truly spiritual activity but, on the contrary, a highly egoistic one.The recognition of his own faults should make a man humbler, when it is beneficial, not prouder, which the thought that he ought to have been above these faults makes him.

Paul Brunton

#28. Solitude is strength; to depend on the presence of the crowd is weakness. The man who needs a mob to nerve him is much more alone than he imagines.

Paul Brunton

#29. Whoever lives in the spirit lives in perennial peace. It is a happy peace, a smiling peace, but one is not lost in it. One is aware also of the suffering which exists around him or her and the world at large.

Paul Brunton

#30. Nothing matters so much that we should throw ourselves into a state of panic about it.
No happening is so important that we should let ourselves be exiled
from from inner peace and mental calm for its sake.

Paul Brunton

#31. When every situation which life can offer is turned to the profit of spiritual growth, no situation can really be a bad one.

Paul Brunton

#32. Now an extraordinary and helpful fact is that by making Mind the object of our attention, not only does the serenity which is its nature begin to well up of its own accord but its steady unchanging character itself helps spontaneously to repel all disturbing thoughts.

Paul Brunton

#33. The ego will always be able to find ways to keep the aspirant busy in self-improvement, thus binding him or her to the fact that the self is still there behind all the improvements. For why should the ego kill itself?

Paul Brunton

#34. Every morning is like a new reincarnation into this world. Let us take it then for what it is and live each moment anew.

Paul Brunton

#35. The succession of thoughts appears in time, but the gap between two of them is outside time. The gap itself is normally unobserved. The chance of enlightenment is missed.

Paul Brunton

#36. It is a grave misconception to regard the mystical progress as passing mostly through ecstasies and raptures. On the contrary, it passes just as much through broken hearts and bruised emotions, through painful sacrifices and melancholy renunciations.

Paul Brunton

#37. Our greatest illusion is disillusion. We imagine that we are disillusioned with life, when the truth is that we have not even begun to live.

Paul Brunton

#38. Meditation is THE fundamental practice of the Quest.

Paul Brunton

#39. Whoever wants the "I" to yield up its mysterious and tremendous secret must stop it from looking perpetually in the mirror, must stop the little ego's fascination with its own image.

Paul Brunton

#40. He is beginning to master wisdom when he tries to learn how not to try.

Paul Brunton

#41. Man is more miserable, more restless and unsatisfied than ever before, simply because half his nature
the spiritual
is starving for true food, and the other half
the material
is fed with bad food.

Paul Brunton

#42. The world is our school for spiritual discovery.

Paul Brunton

#43. If outer events bring him to a position where he can bear them no longer and force him to cry out to the higher power in helplessness for relief, or if inner feelings bring humiliation and recognition of his dependence on that power, this crushing of the ego may open the door to grace.

Paul Brunton

#44. The ordinary man is aware of his surroundings, first, by naming and labelling them; second, by linking them with past memory of them; and third, by relating them to his own personal self. The illumined egoless man is simply aware of them, without any of these other added activities.

Paul Brunton

#45. Your self is sacred; be true to it.

Paul Brunton

#46. Outwardly one's life may suffer every kind of limitation, from bodily paralysis to miserable surroundings, but inwardly it is free in meditation to reach out to a sphere of light, beauty, truth, love, and power.

Paul Brunton

#47. That deep silence has a melody of its own, a sweetness unknown amid the harsh discords of the world's sounds.

Paul Brunton

#48. Find the god in your own heart and you will understand by direct intuition what all the great teachers, real mystics, true philosophers and inspired people have been trying to tell you by the tortuous method of using words.

Paul Brunton