friends

“Mind, like a crystal, is colored by its surroundings.
You are bound to reflect the qualities and shortcomings of the good or bad friends whose company you keep.

If you associate with the malevolent, the selfish, the rancorous, the intolerant, and the arrogant, their faults will affect you. You would do better to keep your distance.”

~ H.H. Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche

Being

Whoever possesses God in their being, has him in a divine manner, and he shines out to them in all things; for them all things taste of God and in all things it is God's image that they see.

The soul in which this birth is to take place must keep absolutely pure and must live in noble fashion, quite collected, and turned entirely inward: not running out through the five senses into the multiplicity of creatures, but all inturned and collected and in the purest part: there is His place; He disdains anything else.

- Meister Eckhart