Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead.
Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities.
There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self.
To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.
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.