So, as long as your inner life is enslaved to external situations, it will remain a precarious condition. There is no other way for it to be. What then is the way out? The way out is a very simple change in direction. You just need to see that the source and basis of your experience is within you. Human experience may be stimulated or catalyzed by external situations, but the source is within. Pain or pleasure, joy or misery, agony or ecstasy, happens only inside you. Human folly is that people are always trying to extract joy from the outside. You may use the outside as a stimulus or trigger, but the real thing always comes from within.

Many people know so little about what is beyond their short range of experience. They look within themselves - and find nothing! Therefore they conclude that there is nothing outside themselves either.

Outside show is a poor substitute for inner worth.

Success on the outside means nothing unless you also have success within.

External goals cannot fill internal voids.

The ultimate significance in life comes not from something external but from something internal. It comes from a sense of esteem for ourselves, which is not something we can ever get from someone else.

Events in life mean nothing if you do not reflect on them in a deep way, and ideas from books are pointless if they have no application to life as you live it.

We cannot solve life's problems except by solving them.

My outer success did not change the inner state of my mind and heart. Part of me kept insisting there had to be more to life than this.

I do not remember consciously thinking that I was a seeker or that I was looking for my home for peace of mind. But I do remember well that chronic state of emptiness and sadness, superimposed on giant pools of damned-up inside tears. In nearly every area of my life, I felt no one really understood me and I understood nothing at all.

And this is the strangest of all paradoxes of the human adventure; we live inside all experience, but we are permitted to bear witness only to the outside. Such is the riddle of life and the story of the passing of our days.

Searching outside oneself for what can only be found within can lead to a life lived in the wrong direction and sacrifices made for the wrong reasons. People can wind up alienated from themselves even if they achieve lofty goals set by others.

Men, it is in vain that you seek within yourselves the cure for your miseries. All your intelligence can only bring you to realize that it is not within yourselves that you will find either truth or good.

Very different conditions of life confronted them from those we face, but it is ever to be borne in mind that though the outside of human life changes much, the inside changes little, and the lesson-book we cannot graduate from is human experience.

There is nothing outside of yourself that can ever enable you to get better, stronger, richer, quicker or smarter. Everything is within. Everything exists. Seek nothing outside of yourself.