she considered the possibility of telling her about everything that was happening, but then she changed her mind; people never learn anything by being told; they have to find out for themselves.
To understand the present with its full, rich significance, the mind must free itself from the habit of self-protecting acquisition; when it is utterly naked, then there is immortality.
In my schoolboy days I had no aversion to slavery. I was not aware there was anything wrong about it. No-one arraigned it in my hearing; the local papers said nothing against it; the local pulpit taught us that God approved it, that it was a holy thing, and that the doubter need only look in the Bible if he wished to settle his mind.
Death approaches, which is always impending like the stone over Tantalus: then comes superstition with which he who is imbued can never have peace of mind.
As long as the mind is seeking to fill itself, it will always be empty. When the mind is no longer concerned with filling its own emptiness, then only does that emptiness cease to be.
If we are to reach certainty and true autonomy of realization, we need to be willing to be heretics. What's more, we need to become universal heretics, not believing anything that we do not know from direct experience, beyond stories, beyond hearsay, and even beyond the mind.