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"Eat thou not the bread of him that hath an
evil eye, neither desire thou his dainty meats: For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he: Eat and drink, saith
he to thee; but his heart is not with thee. The morsel which thou hast eaten shalt thou vomit up, and lose thy
sweet words."
The passage seems to suggest that one
should consider the true motivations of a person who is being uncharacteristically generous before accepting his
generosity - while in the title and content of James Allen's work the passage is in a different context; In the
Bible the passage is referring to another person, and in James Allen's work the passage is adopted to primarily
refer to the reader himself.
This book is written in terms of
responsibility assumption.
The book opens with the
statement:
Mind is the Master power that moulds and makes, And Man is Mind, and evermore
he takes The tool of Thought, and, shaping what he wills, Brings forth a thousand joys, a thousand ills: — He
thinks in secret, and it comes to pass: Environment is but his looking-glass.
Chapter 1 starts with the quote from
Dhammapada where effect of karmas is explained.
· Men do not attract what they want, but what
they are.
· A man is literally what he thinks, his
character being the complete sum of all his thoughts.
· Cherish your visions. Cherish your ideals.
Cherish the music that stirs in your heart, the beauty that forms in your mind, the loveliness that drapes your
purest thoughts, for out of them will grow all delightful conditions, all heavenly environment, of these, if you
but remain true to them your world will at last be built.
· The soul attracts that which it secretly
harbors, that which it loves, and also that which it fears. It reaches the height of its cherished aspirations. It
falls to the level of its unchastened desires - and circumstances are the means by which the soul receives its
own.
· Men are anxious to improve their
circumstances, but are unwilling to improve themselves, they therefore remain bound.
· Every action and feeling is preceded by a
thought.
· Right thinking begins with the words we say to
ourselves.
· Circumstance does not make the man, it reveals
him to himself.
· You cannot travel within and stand still
without.
· As the physically weak man can make himself
strong by careful and patient training, so the man of weak thoughts, can make them strong by exercising himself in
right thinking.
· Every man is where he is by the law of his
being; the thoughts which he has built into his character have brought him there, and in the arrangement of his
life there is no element of chance, but all is the result of a law which cannot er
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