Heaven is long-enduring, and earth continues long. The reason why heaven and earth are able to endure and continue thus long is because they do not live of, or for, themselves.

One thing that I find very unmotivating is the kind of Plan B argument: when Earth gets destroyed, you want to be somewhere else. That doesn’t work for me. We have sent robotic probes now to every place in the solar system, and this is the best one.

My philosophy is: It’s none of my business what people say of me and think of me.

The false is nothing but an imitation of the true.

There is the good and the bad, the great and the low, the just and the unjust. I swear to you that all that will never change.

Our nature consists in motion; complete rest is death.

The high destiny of the individual is to serve rather than to rule.

We really have to understand the person we want to love. If our love is only a will to possess, it is not love. If we only think of ourselves, if we know only our own needs and ignore the needs of the other person, we cannot love.

My thought is me: that is why I cannot stop thinking. I exist because I think I cannot keep from thinking.

The marvel of the Bhagavad-Gita is its truly beautiful revelation of life’s wisdom which enables philosophy to blossom into religion.

The great quest of life has always been to discover truth.

As I approached my 95th birthday, I was burdened to write a book that addressed the epidemic of ‚easy believism.‘ There is a mindset today that if people believe in God and do good works, they are going to Heaven.

It is impossible to reason without arriving at a Supreme Being.

Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

All mankind is divided into three classes: those that are immovable, those that are movable, and those that move.

The state comes into existence for the sake of life and continues to exist for the sake of good life.

The deed is everything, the glory is naught.

The doorstep to the temple of wisdom is a knowledge of our own ignorance.

I think one’s feelings waste themselves in words; they ought all to be distilled into actions which bring results.

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

Thought once awakened does not again slumber; unfolds itself into a System of Thought; grows, in man after man, generation after generation, – till its full stature is reached, and such System of Thought can grow no farther, but must give place to another.

Whatever is done for love always occurs beyond good and evil.

I try to give to the poor people for love what the rich could get for money. No, I wouldn’t touch a leper for a thousand pounds; yet I willingly cure him for the love of God.

Children’s talent to endure stems from their ignorance of alternatives.

You give but little when you give of your possessions. It is when you give of yourself that you truly give.

All our knowledge has its origins in our perceptions.

Everything that we see is a shadow cast by that which we do not see.

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?

To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction.

Man is an exception, whatever else he is. If he is not the image of God, then he is a disease of the dust. If it is not true that a divine being fell, then we can only say that one of the animals went entirely off its head.

Nothing is divine but what is agreeable to reason.

I believe Karl Marx could have subscribed to the Sermon on the Mount.

If there is something to pardon in everything, there is also something to condemn.

In so far as the mind is stronger than the body, so are the ills contracted by the mind more severe than those contracted by the body.

Anyone who wants to be pope doesn’t care much for themselves, God doesn’t bless them. I didn’t want to be pope.

We are born believing. A man bears beliefs as a tree bears apples.

The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you can see.

All things truly wicked start from innocence.

Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors.

Existence really is an imperfect tense that never becomes a present.

The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next.

To be conscious means not simply to be, but to be reported, known, to have awareness of one’s being added to that being.

What is straight? A line can be straight, or a street, but the human heart, oh, no, it’s curved like a road through mountains.

Real living is living for others.

The Hindu religions gave me the impression of a vast well into which one plunges in order to grasp the reflection of the sun.

Sin is geographical.

Every man has the right to risk his own life in order to preserve it. Has it ever been said that a man who throws himself out the window to escape from a fire is guilty of suicide?

I have never felt more confident in myself, more clear on who I am as a woman. But I am constantly thinking about my own health and making sure that I’m eating right and getting exercise and watching the aches and pains. I want to be this really fly 80-90-year old.

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

It is by no means an irrational fancy that, in a future existence, we shall look upon what we think our present existence, as a dream.

We are not without empathetic terror when we open Pascal’s ‚Pensees‘ and read, ‚I am the great silent spaces between worlds.‘

Our faith is faith in someone else’s faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case.

To die for an idea; it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true!

There is no need for temples, no need for complicated philosophies. My brain and my heart are my temples; my philosophy is kindness.

It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.

In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point.

Everything that happens once can never happen again. But everything that happens twice will surely happen a third time.

Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.

Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.

If two men agree on everything, you may be sure that one of them is doing the thinking.

When we talk about mortality, we are talking about our children.