“If we seek something, that same thing is seeking us.”

— Paulo Coelho , book Aleph

Source: Aleph

Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Paulo Coelho 844

Brazilian lyricist and novelist 1947

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“The moment we begin to seek love, love begins to seek us.
And to save us.”

Paulo Coelho book By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept

By The River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept (1994)
Source: By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept
Context: Love is always new. Regardless of whether we love once, twice, or a dozen times in our life, we always face a brand-new situation. Love can consign us to hell or to paradise, but it always takes us somewhere. We simply have to accept it, because it is what nourishes our existence. If we reject it, we die of hunger, because we lack the courage to reach out a hand and pluck the fruit from the branches of the tree of life. We have to take love where we find it, even if it means hours, days, weeks of disappointment and sadness.
The moment we begin to seek love, love begins to seek us.
And to save us.

“In seeking there are several things involved: there is the seeker and the thing that he seeks after.”

Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986) Indian spiritual philosopher

Source: 1970s, Krishnamurti in India, 1970-71 (1971), p. 157
Context: In seeking there are several things involved: there is the seeker and the thing that he seeks after. When the seeker finds what he thinks is truth, is God, is enlightenment, he must be able to recognize it. He must recognize it, right? Recognition implies previous knowledge, otherwise you cannot recognize. I cannot recognize you if I had not met you yesterday. Therefore when I say this is truth, I have already known it and therefore it is not truth. So a man who is seeking truth lives a life of hypocrisy, because his truth is the projection of his memory, of his desire, of his intentions to find something other than "what is", a formula. So seeking implies duality — the one who seeks and the thing sought after — and where there is duality there is conflict. There is wastage of energy. So you can never find it, you can never invite it.

“We carry within us the wonders we seek without us.”

Thomas Browne (1605–1682) English polymath

Source: Prose: "Religio Medici" , "Hydriotaphia" , "Garden of Cyrus" , "Letter to a Friend" , "Christian Morals" and Selections from Other Works

“We carry inside us the wonders we seek outside us.”

Rumi (1207–1273) Iranian poet

Misattributed
Source: Frequently quoted on social media, but appears to be a misquote of Thomas Browne's "We carry within us the wonders we seek without us: there is all Africa and her prodigies in us" in Religio Medici (1643) pt. 1, sect. 15.

“The life of money-making is one undertaken under compulsion, and wealth is evidently not the good we are seeking; for it is merely useful and for the sake of something else.”

Aristotle book Nicomachean Ethics

Book I, 1096a.5
Nicomachean Ethics

“Everywhere we seek the Absolute, and always we find only things.”

Novalis book Blüthenstaub

Fragment No. 1; Variant: We seek the absolute everywhere and only ever find things.
Blüthenstaub (1798)

“We stop the one who can't cease from seeking things outside, and practice with our bodies with a posture that seeks absolutely nothing. This is zazen.”

Kodo Sawaki (1880–1965) Japanese zen Buddhist monk

"Zenshu," Collected Works, vol. 15 (Tokyo: Daihorinkaku, 1966), p. 336

“Most of what we strive for in our modern life uses the apparatus of goal seeking that was originally set up to seek goals in the state of nature.”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

Darwin's Dangerous Disciple: An Interview by Frank Miele (1995)

“It is God’s will that we have three things in our seeking: — The first is that we seek earnestly and diligently, without sloth, and, as it may be through His grace, without unreasonable heaviness and vain sorrow.”

Julian of Norwich (1342–1416) English theologian and anchoress

The Second Revelation, Chapter 10
Context: It is God’s will that we have three things in our seeking: — The first is that we seek earnestly and diligently, without sloth, and, as it may be through His grace, without unreasonable heaviness and vain sorrow. The second is, that we abide Him steadfastly for His love, without murmuring and striving against Him, to our life’s end: for it shall last but awhile. The third is that we trust in Him mightily of full assured faith. For it is His will that we know that He shall appear suddenly and blissfully to all that love Him.
For His working is privy, and He willeth to be perceived; and His appearing shall be swiftly sudden; and He willeth to be trusted. For He is full gracious and homely: Blessed may He be!

“God often works more by the life of the illiterate seeking the things that are God's, than by the ability of the learned seeking the things that are their own.”

Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109) Benedictine monk, philosopher, and prelate

Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 123.

“If we seek something, that same thing is seeking us.”

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Paulo Coelho 844

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