Man is so intelligent that he feels impelled to invent theories to account for what happens in the world. Unfortunately, he is not quite intelligent enough, in most cases, to find correct explanations. So that when he acts on his theories, he behaves very often like a lunatic.
No social stability without individual stability.
Deprived of their newspapers or a novel, reading-addicts will fall back onto cookery books, on the literature which is wrapped around bottles of patent medicine, on those instructions for keeping the contents crisp which are printed on the outside of boxes of breakfast cereals. On anything.
To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs.
I’m afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.
Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.
Experience teaches only the teachable.
Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.
Liberties aren’t given, they are taken.
A love of nature keeps no factories busy.
A democracy which makes or even effectively prepares for modern, scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic. No country can be really well prepared for modern war unless it is governed by a tyrant, at the head of a highly trained and perfectly obedient bureaucracy.
It's a little embarrassing that after 45 years of research and study, the best advice I can give people is to be a little kinder to each other.
I can sympathize with people’s pains, but not with their pleasure. There is something curiously boring about somebody else’s happiness.
A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely from the author’s soul.
The Bhagavad-Gita is the most systematic statement of spiritual evolution of endowing value to mankind. It is one of the most clear and comprehensive summaries of perennial philosophy ever revealed; hence its enduring value is subject not only to India but to all of humanity.
My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing.
The trouble with fiction,” said John Rivers, “is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense.
Never put off till tomorrow the fun you can have today.
To be enlightened is to be aware, always, of total reality in its immanent otherness – to be aware of it and yet remain in a condition to survive as an animal. Our goal is to discover that we have always been where we ought to be. Unhappily we make the task exceedingly difficult for ourselves.
Did you ever feel, as though you had something inside you that was only waiting for you to give it a chance to come out? Some sort of extra power that you aren’t using – you know, like all the water that goes down the falls instead of through the turbines?