For me, success is, during this early pilgrimage, to leave the woodpile a little higher than I found it.
I have never seen a monument erected to a pessimist.
Tomorrow has always been better than today, and it always will be.
Life must always go on and Yoga is not about an escape from life. Yoga’s about a way of dealing with life more effectively; to be able to involve oneself with one’s family, one’s friends, one’s social commitments, one’s job and yet at the same time maintain one’s centre.
The years don’t always add wisdom, but they do add perspective.
Luck is a word used to describe the success of people you don’t like.
Self Government won’t work without self discipline.
If you found yourself in a situation where you could either save a drowning man, or you could take a Pulitzer prize winning photograph of him drowning, what shutter speed and setting would you use?
In small towns as well as large, good people outnumber bad people by 100 to 1. In big towns the 100 are nervous. But in small towns, it’s the one.
Golf is a game in which you yell “for,” shoot six, and write down five.
Dependency arguments often come from elites – either aid agencies or governments – and say something about attitudes to poor people.
The indignation of politicians is NOT a good measure of the gravity of any situation.
But, as all scientists know, there is a time lag of 12 to 18 months between the time a manuscript is submitted and the time it is published in a scientific journal.
Growth is the process of responding positively to change.
Each generation imagines that we’re all going to hell. Each generation goes through a little hell and comes out heat tempered and better than before.
For me the breath really is the tool which allows you to understand what’s happening on the mental level and what’s happening on the emotional level, and it also allows you to measure what’s happening on a physical level.
Everything you use in a modern life style has to be made using a tool of some sort.
My own interest in Yoga came from a vague understanding of Indian thought and Indian philosophy in the late sixties and early seventies and from looking at the idea of meditation and at what meditation was.
The breath is seen to be the key between the emotional state, the mental state and physical state. It is perhaps the most important tool, and it’s one whose importance is underestimated in the West.
When people come to Yoga, they are perhaps coming to it at the end of a long series of alternatives, and they’re looking for something that’s going to act very quickly. But Yoga is not a quick answer.