Soon silence will have passed into legend. Man has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation.

Creativity means to push open the heavy, groaning doorway to life.

It seems to me that most of us get all the adventure we are capable of digesting. Personally, I have never had to fight a dozen pirates single handed, and I have never jumped from a moving express train onto the back of a horse, and I have never been discovered in the harem of…

No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.

The day the world turns our way, we are great philosophers and can close our eyes to possessions; but the day the world turns against us, we are bawling children, grasping for toys.

Do not do unto others as you would expect they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.

Keep searching for that sound you hear in your head until it becomes a reality.

The use of force alone is but temporary. It may subdue for a moment; but it does not remove the necessity of subduing again: and a nation is not governed, which is perpetually to be conquered.

Only the impossible is worth the effort.

You only live once, and usually not even then.

Everything of importance has been said before by somebody who did not discover it.

Life is hard by the yard, son. But you don’t have to do it by the yard. By the inch it’s a cinch. And money can’t buy everything. For example: poverty.

After a good dinner one can forgive anybody, even one’s own relations.

We really do need structure, so we can see we are nowhere.

It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.

You are always the receptacle of what has gone before you, whether or not you know it and whether or not you can reach it.

Once executed, the idea will never be as good as it is in my mind? Toughen up. Leon Battista Alberti, the 15th century architectural theorist, said, “Errors accumulate in the sketch and compound in the model.” But better an imperfect dome in Florence than cathedrals in the clouds.

I often feel that life is about to begin, only to realize it is almost over.

To have some deep feeling about Buddhism is not the point; we just do what we should do, like eating supper and going to bed. This is Buddhism.

At a given moment I open my eyes and exist. And before that, during all eternity, what was there? Nothing.

Oh, how daily life is.

Art does not reproduce the visible; rather it makes visible.

I do not call a man a Brahman because of his birth or of his mother. He is supercilious in his mode of address and he is wealthy: but the poor man who is free from attachments, him I call indeed a Brahman.

I am the doubter and the doubt, / [Tab in] And I the hymn the Brahmin sings.

Only very slowly and late have men come to realize that unless freedoms is universal it is only extended privilege.

I wish that every human life might be pure transparent freedom.

There is no patriotic art and no patriotic science.

Doing nothing, but leaving nothing undone.

When crows find a dying snake, / They behave as if they were eagles. / When I see myself as a victim, / I am hurt by trifling failures.

I got disappointed in human nature … and gave it up because I found it too much like my own.