Images of Wisdom (Sample)

Love injects life with wisdom
Reason without heart
may convince one, intellectually,
but it is like an autumn leaf—
perhaps beautiful, but for all that
lacking the sap of life.

Relationships
Lovingly tend every relationship,
like a garden,
until it yields the rich harvest of love.

Marriage
Marriage is a long-term investment.
Even when, tree-like, it grows
beyond the need for that kind of care
which must be lavished on a tender sapling,
such a close partnership nevertheless demands
special energy and careful, loving solicitude.

Bathe yourself daily
Inner peace, like a weightless waterfall,
washes away all one’s worries.
It bestows on him an ever-refreshing,
glad sense of confidence in his abilities.

Evolution
Life, like a lotus, rises
out of the mud of lower consciousness
toward, and finally into,
the light of divine awareness.

Courtesy
Courtesy is a healing balm;
it can soothe troubled hearts,
and win cooperation even from the hostile.

Your ideas
If you have what seems to you a good idea,
welcome suggestions concerning it, but protect it also,
like a tender plant, from anyone who,
like a bull running loose in a tulip field,
would trample on your enthusiasm.

Discrimination
Use discrimination like a sword:
With that sharp blade slice in two
whatever dilemma life places before you.
Separate right from wrong, truth from error,
and charity from cold insistence on rule and precedent.
Make the quest for joy your first priority.

Loyalty
Make loyalty the rudder of your barque of life.
If you stand firmly by high principles,
not even the strongest gales of wrong opinion
will be able to blow you off course.
Be loyal above all to truth
as you most deeply understand it.
You will then keep growing
in strength and understanding.

Attachment
Attachment, like an unripe fruit, clings
to whatever nourishes its hopes of fulfillment
even when fierce winds of tragedy buffet it.
Non-attachment, on the other hand, releases those hopes
at the very first breath of disappointment,
knowing that such is, indeed, the nature of this world.

The universal struggle
Every human being is, in a sense, a nation.
Human beings, like many countries,
are nations divided against themselves.
One segment of their “populace” affirms the right;
the other segment rejects that right,
and affirms the wrong.
Ask yourself at the end of every day:
Which side, this day, has won the battle?

Be the master of yourself
Every morning, command your subconscious
with some strong, wholesome affirmation.
Train your will to be a good general,
adamantly determined to fight for truth and right.
A military leader would be foolish
to forge ahead in the mere hope
that his army will follow him.
By affirmation, train your soldiers, also,
to be steadfastly obedient to your will.

Logic
Reason, like a railway train,
can follow only those tracks which lead outward
from already-existing premises.
Seek, rather, the inspiration of intuitive insight.

Leadership
An excellent way to run an organization
is to follow the ways of Nature.
As the human body submits to a chain of command
descending from the head,
a well-run institution is never so democratic
that it gives an equal voice to every member.
Leadership must seek support and consent from its followers,
but it needs, itself, to be competent,
experienced, and insightful.