“Peace is self-examination and being all right with what you see. Freedom is being able to open up to others without the worry of persecution. Happiness is seeing others for who they are and embracing the differences.”

“How can another see into me, into my most secret self, without my being able to see in there myself? And without my being able to see him in me. And if my secret self, that which can be revealed only to the other, to the wholly other, to God if you wish, is a secret that I will never reflect on, that I will never know or experience or possess as my own, then what sense is there in saying that it is my secret, or in saying more generally that a secret belongs, that it is proper to or belongs to some one, or to some other who remains someone. It's perhaps there that we find the secret of secrecy. Namely, that it is not a matter of knowing and that it is there for no one. A secret doesn't belong, it can never be said to be at home or in its place. The question of the self: who am I not in the sense of who am I but rather who is this I that can say who? What is the- I and what becomes of responsibility once the identity of the I trembles in secret?”

“At first glance, the key and the lock it fits may seem very different," Sazed said. "Different in shape, different in function, different in design. The man who looks at them without knowledge of their true nature might think them opposites, for one is meant to open, and the other to keep closed. Yet, upon closer examination he might see that without one, the other becomes useless. The wise man then sees that both lock and key were created for the same purpose.”

“What is necessary, he explains, is an understanding that the youth are not the Other. It is being able to see your humanity reflected in them.”

“Who sees all beings in his own self and his own self in all beings, loses all fear.”

“Acceptance is the opposite of judgment and the antidote to judgment, and acceptance brings us the experience of love. What is the experience of love? It is the experience of accepting and being accepted, the experience of relaxation, of being able to just be, without struggling and striving to be any different than we are or requiring that others be different than however they are. That is what we all want—to just be able to relax and be okay just the way we are and to be okay with others just the way they are.”