1. Permitting your life to be taken over by another person is like letting the waiter eat your dinner.
2. Find yourself, for courage and confidence are as easy as breathing to the person who really knows who he is.
3. Some people prolong their unhappiness by dramatizing it, which is like expecting applause for having a headache.
4. Growing up into the fullness of inner strength is as exciting as seeking gold and as rewarding as finding it.
5. A warring world has no power to injure your real nature any more than darkness can shake a tree.
6. We are rewarded according to personal effort, like a man who is given as much land as he can  walk over during a day.
7. Talking about  love does not make a man loving any more than talking about sugar makes him a slice of cake.
8. Society is like a crowd in carnival costumes with everyone fearful that others will see through his disguise.
9. Danger recognized as danger is not hazardous, as with a sailor who sights and steers away from rocks in the sea.
10. A truly strong person does not need the approval of others any more than a lion needs the approval of sheep.
11. Remove the dark cloud of negative thought, and the guiding star of under- standing brightly appears.
12. People worry over the absence of worry, which is like thinking that the end of the storm means the end of  the sky.
13. Man is like a lost tourist who has forgotten he has a map in his pocket which can direct him to his hotel.
14. If you can talk a monkey out of a banana you can talk logic with someone whose self-interest rejects logic.
15. Inner liberty can be judged by how often a person feels offended, for you can no more insult a mature man than you can paint the air.
16. Thinking that stubborn beliefs can give us a new life is like watching a stone statue, hoping it will move.
17. Life is never too tough for your higher self, any more than a rock is too much for a river.
18. Talking to the average man about something higher than sex and money is like talking to a rabbit about a rainbow.
19. Like an army doctor treating enemy soldiers, truth is patient and kindly toward the parts of us which resist correction.
20. When sad, we need only realize that we are in the wrong place internally, like a lark that belongs in the sky, not in a cage.
21. Just as a single wave is powered by the entire ocean, a sincere mind has vast resources at its command.
22. You can refuse entrance to unhappy moods, but you must be alert, just as you might close a window at the first sign of rain.
23. We can no more enjoy life by hoping for a future result than we can enjoy music by waiting for the final note.
24. It is as possible to be pleasantly alone with yourself while surrounded by a crowd as it is to walk alone in the peaceful woods.
25. The truly happy man is one who feels no different when the party ends than he did while it was going on.
26. Inner guidance is heard like soft music in the night by those who have learned to listen.
27. Men who fall from a canoe while standing up to attract attention always claim someone pushed them.
28. Like helpful librarians who aid your search for books, higher powers do for you what you cannot do for yourself.
29. Your life makes sense when you don’t need other people to confirm that it does, which is the true independence of a soaring eagle.
30. The difference between living under your own power and under the power of social influence is the difference between songs and tears.
31. Just as a piano responds to the touch of a musician, a sincere request for solutions will always be answered from a higher source.
32. Right daily decisions are as simple as smiling, once you see the difference between natural and artificial needs.
33. The more you let other people tell you how to sail your boat, the less the boat belongs to you.
34. Loneliness is an impostor who makes you feel far apart from life, but you can see beyond it to happily find yourself approaching home.
35. Just as there are millions of unseen stars, there are endless inner riches for you to discover.
36. Foolishness is simply the nervous preference for wrong ideas, like a sailor anxiously hugging a broken compass.
37. It is no more necessary to live at the mercy of mental howls than it is needful to live next door to a zoo.
38. Inner correction guarantees outer correction,  just as a repaired clock makes its hands go right.
39. Your true nature never needs to anxiously prove itself to others, but lives in calm command, like a popular king.
40. Healing finally comes to the sincere seeker, like a sick man who awakens in the morning to find himself cured.

I explored how the basic operations of what I call the new alchemy—thinking, sensing, feeling, and intuiting—form and shape the primary material of our conscious and unconscious life. And we saw that reshaping this primary material gives rise to forces that transform the world and us, namely creation, animation, resistance, vitality, replication, chance, unification, structure, and transformation.

Realization of the new alchemy brings novel forms of the creative transforming forces into play. While the mind-to-matter transformation deals with primary or archetypal images and how these images become material, the next phase of the great work is the transformation of the newly-formed matter into feeling. This is where we begin to feel life in our bodies, as real living tissue. And this applies to all living beings, as all living beings feel. Feeling goes beyond the senses and can be imagined as the fundamental awareness out of which all of the other senses develop. Feeling results from the incessant “hum” of life itself.

In bringing mind into matter we had to deal with resistance and the trickster element. Now, similarly, we must deal with the conflicts and resistance we face in our lives as we attempt to make sense of the world, and learn to put up with our material demands, our addictions, our ups and downs, successes and failures. For many of us on the spiritual path, the great work gets trapped here—we live and die never realizing that other phases of transformation are even possible. In other words, we get fooled by our appetites.

To make the leap, to realize the remaining phases, requires understanding that the “stuck” life is only a phase, much like a child throwing a tantrum is merely “going through a phase.”