Religions, which condemn the pleasures of sense, drive men to seek the pleasures of power. Throughout history power has been the vice of the ascetic.

People say maybe we have a soul and chimpanzees don’t. I feel that it’s quite possible that if we have souls, chimpanzees have souls as well.

Neither a wise man nor a brave man lies down on the tracks of history to wait for the train of the future to run over him.

Where love is, there God is also.

I don’t think I’ve ever been an agnostic. I’ve always thought there’s a superior power, that this is not the real world and that there’s a world to come.

I would believe only in a God that knows how to Dance.

Theology is unnecessary.

I noticed words crudely spray-painted upon the wall, perhaps by a young Berliner: ‚This wall will fall. Beliefs become reality.‘ Yes, across Europe, this wall will fall. For it cannot withstand faith; it cannot withstand truth. The wall cannot withstand freedom.

Faith is an oasis in the heart which will never be reached by the caravan of thinking.

The roots of the problems we face in the world, in our national life, and in our family and personal lives are spiritual.

Of all the inventions of humans, the computer is going to rank near or at the top as history unfolds and we look back. It is the most awesome tool that we have ever invented. I feel incredibly lucky to be at exactly the right place in Silicon Valley, at exactly the right time, historically, where this invention has taken form.

When men do not have healthy notions of the Divinity, false ideas supplant them, just as in bad times one uses counterfeit money when there is no good money.

Baldwin thought Europe was a bore, and Chamberlain thought it was only a greater Birmingham.

God has entrusted me with myself.

It is a most delightful reflection that if I come to the throne of God in prayer, I may feel a thousand defects, but yet there is hope. I usually feel more dissatisfied with my prayers than with anything else I do.

Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.

I’ve got nothing against records – I’ve spent my life making them – but they are a kind of historical blip.

I have done one thing that I think is a contribution: I helped Buddhist science and modern science combine. No other Buddhist has done that. Other lamas, I don’t think they ever pay attention to modern science. Since my childhood, I have a keen interest.

In the late 1960s, the masses were supposed to be passive, not entering into the public arena and having their voices heard.

People often speak of God being even-handed. God is not even-handed. God is biased, in favor of the weak, of the despised.

God is the same God, always and everywhere. He is omnipresent not virtually only, but also substantially, for virtue cannot subsist without substance.

The end of life is to be like God, and the soul following God will be like Him.

We would like to live as we once lived, but history will not permit it.

Our chief justices have probably had more profound and lasting influence on their times and on the direction of the nation than most presidents.

Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around.

The happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history.

The history of all previous societies has been the history of class struggles.

God screens us evermore from premature ideas.

The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home.

I thank you God for this most amazing day, for the leaping greenly spirits of trees, and for the blue dream of sky and for everything which is natural, which is infinite, which is yes.

To love someone means to see him as God intended him.

But what is liberty without wisdom, and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint.

Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded.

I care to live only to entice people to look at Nature’s loveliness. Heaven knows that John the Baptist was not more eager to get all his fellow sinners into the Jordan than I to baptize all of mine in the beauty of God’s mountains.

God made you a masterpiece – be blessed, secure, disciplined and equipped.

Whatsoever is, is in God, and without God nothing can be, or be conceived.

You carry Mother Earth within you. She is not outside of you. Mother Earth is not just your environment.

I think that God gives you your own will and choices. I don’t believe that we’re supposed to drag ourselves through life defeated and not see God’s blessings. But you have to make the right choices and follow that still, small voice within you. Because I think that’s how God leads us.

In the early 1940s, as a young teenager, I was utterly appalled by the racist and jingoist hysteria of the anti-Japanese propaganda. The Germans were evil, but treated with some respect: They were, after all, blond Aryan types, just like our imaginary self-image. Japanese were mere vermin, to be crushed like ants.

To say that Christ is the term and motive force of evolution, to say that he manifests himself as ‚evolver,‘ is implicitly to recognize that he becomes attainable in and through the whole process of evolution.

Man gives you the award but God gives you the reward.

Here’s what I believe, I think the FBI is the premier law enforcement agency in the history of the world but i think there was some bad apples over there.

I just really believe people have to get hungry. I think maybe what we need to do, instead of trying to stuff our beliefs down people’s throats, is just pray for them to really be hungry and to see their neediness.

What ever disunites man from God, also disunites man from man.

I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.

The truth is, if we don’t learn to submit to authority, we won’t ever learn to submit to God.

A vow is a purely religious act which cannot be taken in a fit of passion. It can be taken only with a mind purified and composed and with God as witness.

It’s always interesting about God because it’s like all of the religions in the world say that they pray to the same God, and yet they ask that same one God to divide itself up and agree with this one and fight against that one.

I do not concern myself with gods and spirits either good or evil nor do I serve any.

From my perspective, I absolutely believe in a greater spiritual power, far greater than I am, from which I have derived strength in moments of sadness or fear. That’s what I believe, and it was very, very strong in the forest.

There is a specter haunting Europe, the specter of Communism.

A covenant made with God should be regarded not as restrictive but as protective.

It is a big temptation to me, when I create a character for a novel, to say that he is what he is because of faulty wiring, or because of microscopic amounts of chemicals which he ate or failed to eat on that particular day.

One of the most important decisions you’ll ever make is choosing the kind of universe you exist in: is it helpful and supportive or hostile and unsupportive? Your answer to this question will make all the difference in terms of how you live your life and what kind of Divine assistance you attract.

Mere humans who root through their refrigerators at three o’clock in the morning can only produce writing that matches what they do. And that includes me.

God didn’t make me to make movies, flex muscles, buy gold. What you love the most becomes your God… If I never make another dollar, my life is complete.

The extent of your consciousness is limited only by your ability to love and to embrace with your love the space around you, and all it contains.

The great question of our time is, ‚Will we be motivated by materialistic philosophy or by spiritual power?‘

Repeal the Missouri Compromise – repeal all compromises – repeal the Declaration of Independence – repeal all past history, you still cannot repeal human nature. It will be the abundance of man’s heart that slavery extension is wrong; and out of the abundance of his heart, his mouth will continue to speak.

I maintain that Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect.

For me, the real earth is that chosen part of the universe, still almost universally dispersed and in course of gradual segregation, but which is little by little taking on body and form in Christ.