The faith that can move mountains needs three ingredients to work: belief in yourself, belief in others, and the ability to draw on your inner strength.
Act kindly towards women, for they were created from a rib and the most crooked part of the rib is its top. If you attempt to straighten it you will break it, if you leave it alone it will remain crooked: so act kindly towards women.
I see all the different religious traditions as paths for the development of inner peace, which is the true foundation of world peace. These ancient traditions come to us as a gift from our common past. Will we continue to cherish it as a gift and hand it over the the future generations as a legacy of our shared desire for peace?
You have to drop all your defenses, only then is intimacy possible. We are all hiding a thousand and on things, not only from others but from ourselves.
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.
The greatest fortune is to know who you are, and who you need not to be.
We see light waves with our eyes, but most of the other particles take 20th-century equipment to discover them.
The faster you go, the shorter you are.
Circumstances rule men and not men rule circumstances.
By seeing life as a game, your lightness of spirit will make problems seem easier.
No form of Nature is inferior to Art; for the arts merely imitate natural
forms.
The Nobel Prize is an honor unique in the world in having found its way into the hearts and minds of simple people everywhere. It casts a light of peace and reason upon us all; and for that I am especially grateful.
A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned how to walk forward.
Inherent in human nature is the quest for certainty and the sense of security that is its reward. So there is always going to be a clash between the evolving self's aspiration for certainty and the necessity to relinquish that need in order to be able to keep moving up to higher stages without ever halting one's vertical development. The authentic self is the expression of the evolutionary imperative itself, within the human heart and mind. It is a perpetual, unending, and always ecstatic impulse in consciousness that strives only to create the future. But in order for the authentic self to function uninhibitedly, the individual has to be willing to continually let go and embrace ever more of the world of form in every moment. It's only a rare individual who actually is going to have the courage, the authenticity of interest, the fearlessness, and the liberated awareness to be able and willing to continually let go in that way and at the same time have his or her own deepest sense of confidence in the nature of being and in life remain absolutely unthreatened. What I am saying is that it's possible to be deeply certain, to have the absolute conviction that is the hallmark of enlightened awareness, together with a profoundly open and vertically aspiring self-sense or evolutionary impulse. At an existential level one can be absolutely convinced and still be vertically reaching, groping, learning, inquiring, and growing eternally.
At my age it is unseemly to be pessimistic.
