He who has made a fair compact with poverty is rich.

The last act is bloody, however pleasant all the rest of the play is: a little earth is thrown at last upon our head, and that is the end forever.

The poor don’t know that their function in life is to exercise our generosity.

We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts, we make the world.

How can you prove whether at this moment we are sleeping, and all our thoughts are a dream; or whether we are awake, and talking to one another in the waking state?

Every man is rich or poor according to the proportion between his desires and his enjoyments.

Life consists in what a man is thinking of all day.

We are all born for love. It is the principle of existence, and its only end.

It is not necessary that whilst I live I live happily; but it is necessary that so long as I live I should live honourably.

The superior man does not, even for the space of a single meal, act contrary to virtue. In moments of haste, he cleaves to it. In seasons of danger, he cleaves to it.

I was born in a very poor family. I used to sell tea in a railway coach as a child. My mother used to wash utensils and do lowly household work in the houses of others to earn a livelihood. I have seen poverty very closely. I have lived in poverty. As a child, my entire childhood was steeped in poverty.

Money is usually attracted, not pursued.

All theory is against freedom of the will; all experience for it.

You just want something else that someone else has, but that doesn’t mean what you have isn’t beautiful, because people always want what you have, and you always want what they have – no one is ever 100 per cent like, ‚Yes, I’m the bomb dot com – from head to toe!‘

Religion and philosophy are to be preserved distinct. We are not to introduce divine revelations into philosophy, nor philosophical opinions into religion.

There are people who have money and people who are rich.

These days there is a lot of poverty in the world, and that’s a scandal when we have so many riches and resources to give to everyone. We all have to think about how we can become a little poorer.

Science in the modern world has many uses; its chief use, however, is to provide long words to cover the errors of the rich.

If you study the writings of the mystics, you will always find things in them that appear to be paradoxes, as in Zen, particularly.

Surely our job while we’re here on Earth is to learn about the world, not to create parallel universes.

The world embarrasses me, and I cannot dream that this watch exists and has no watchmaker.

There is nothing besides a spiritual world; what we call the world of the senses is the Evil in the spiritual world, and what we call Evil is only the necessity of a moment in our eternal evolution.

For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.

We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances.

The call of death is a call of love. Death can be sweet if we answer it in the affirmative, if we accept it as one of the great eternal forms of life and transformation.

There is no such thing as Something for nothing.

Tourism provides employment to the poorest of the poor. Gram seller earns something, auto-rickshaw driver earns something, pakoda seller earns something, and tea seller also earns something.

I never heard of an old man forgetting where he had buried his money! Old people remember what interests them: the dates fixed for their lawsuits, and the names of their debtors and creditors.

Whatsoever is contrary to nature is contrary to reason, and whatsoever is contrary to reason is absurd.

Money is not required to buy one necessity of the soul.

Sincere words are not fine; fine words are not sincere.

Surplus wealth is a sacred trust which its possessor is bound to administer in his lifetime for the good of the community.

If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts, but if he will content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.

It is natural to die as to be born.

It is a way to take people’s wealth from them without having to openly raise taxes. Inflation is the most universal tax of all.

I would rather be able to appreciate things I can not have than to have things I am not able to appreciate.

It is folly for a man to pray to the gods for that which he has the power to obtain by himself.

Measure your wealth by what you’d have left if you lost all your money.

Ignorant people see life as either existence or non-existence, but wise men see it beyond both existence and non-existence to something that transcends them both; this is an observation of the Middle Way.

It is better for you to be free of fear lying upon a pallet, than to have a golden couch and a rich table and be full of trouble.

Some scientists claim that hydrogen, because it is so plentiful, is the basic building block of the universe. I dispute that. I say there is more stupidity than hydrogen, and that is the basic building block of the universe.

Wars of nations are fought to change maps. But wars of poverty are fought to map change.

In the final analysis, the questions of why bad things happen to good people transmutes itself into some very different questions, no longer asking why something happened, but asking how we will respond, what we intend to do now that it happened.

If you were to destroy the belief in immortality in mankind, not only love but every living force on which the continuation of all life in the world depended, would dry up at once.

I have found out in later years that we were very poor, but the glory of America is that we didn’t know it then.

If boyhood and youth are but vanity, must it not be our ambition to become men?

More than 820 million people in the world suffer from hunger; and 790 million of them live in the Third World.

No notice is taken of a little evil, but when it increases it strikes the eye.

There was something undifferentiated and yet complete, which existed before Heaven and Earth. Soundless and formless, it depends on nothing and does not change. It operates everywhere and is free from danger. It may be considered the mother of the universe. I do not know its name; I call it Tao.

I think that a man should not live beyond the age when he begins to deteriorate, when the flame that lighted the brightest moment of his life has weakened.

I mean, I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money.

Truth is ever to be found in simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.

I was never ignorant, as far as being experienced in classrooms and learning about different subjects and actually soaking it up, so I checked into college for a little bit. I took classes at a community college in West L.A. I took psychology, English, and philosophy.

Men’s ideas are the most direct emanations of their material state.

No evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death. He and his are not neglected by the gods.

You say it is the good cause that hallows even war? I say unto you: it is the good war that hallows any cause.

Whatever universe a professor believes in must at any rate be a universe that lends itself to lengthy discourse. A universe definable in two sentences is something for which the professorial intellect has no use. No faith in anything of that cheap kind!

Generous people can become more generous as they become richer, giving away vast fortunes to worthwhile causes as Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are doing.

When you give, it comes back to you.

When I was growing up, my family was so poor we couldn’t afford to pay attention.

All men by nature desire knowledge.