If ye keep watch over your hearts, and listen for the Voice of God and learn of Him, in one short hour ye can learn more from Him than ye could learn from Man in a thousand years.
Interpretation
Understanding and connecting with the divine can provide deeper insights than human teachings.
This quote emphasizes the importance of spiritual awareness and attentiveness to divine guidance. It suggests that by fostering a relationship with God and being open to His voice, one can gain profound wisdom and understanding in a short time, surpassing what might be taught by humans over many years.
In practice
A religious leader might use this quote to encourage followers to seek personal revelations.
Often when He comes, He finds the soul occupied. Other guests are there, and He has to turn away. He cannot gain entry, for we love and desire other things; therefore, His gifts, which He is offering to everyone unceasingly, must remain outside.
Because in the school of the Spirit man learns wisdom through humility, knowledge by forgetting, how to speak by silence, how to live by dying.
Every one should find some suitable time, day or night, to sink into his depths, each according to his own fashion. Not every one is able to engage in contemplative prayer.
As a good wine must be kept in a good cask, so a wholesome body is the proper foundation for a well-appointed inner ground.
If you fall seventy times a day, rise seventy times and return to God so that you will not fall too often.
If we really want to achieve true prayer, we must turn our backs upon everything temporal, everything external, everything that is not divine.
Examine your own hearts. Do you see there any habit or custom which you know is wrong in the sight of God? If you do, don't delay for a moment in attacking it. Resolve at once to lay it aside. Nothing darkens the eyes of the mind so much, and deadens the conscience so surely, as an allowed sin. It may be a little one, but it is not any less dangerous.
I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you.
Pay heed to the tales of old wives. It may well be that they alone keep in memory what it was once needful for the wise to know.
Breath is the vehicle of consciousness and so, by its slow measured observation and distribution, we learn to tug our attention away from external desires toward a judicious, intelligent awareness.
To get anywhere, or even to live a long time, a man has to guess, and guess right, over and over again, without enough data for a logical answer.
No, nothing,' said Dumbledore, and a great sadness filled his face. 'The time is long gone when I could frighten you with a burning wardrobe and force you to make repayment for your crimes. But I wish I could, Tom... I wish I could.
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