All Quotes

"It sometimes strikes me how immensely fortunate I am that each day should take its place in my life, either reddened with the rising and setting sun, or refreshingly cool with deep, dark clouds, or blooming like a white flower in the moonlight. What untold wealth!"

"Reason tells us that creation never can be perfectly happy. So long as it is incomplete it must put up with imperfection and sorrow. It can only be perfect when it ceases to be creation, and is God. Do our prayers dare go so far?"

"Jewel-Like the immortal does not boast of its length of years but of the scintillating point of the moment."

"I saw, all of a sudden, an odd-looking bird making its way through the water to the opposite bank, followed by a great commotion. I found it was a domestic fowl which had managed to escape impending doom in the galley by jumping overboard and was now trying frantically to swim across. It had almost gained the bank when the clutches of its relentless pursuers closed on it, and it was brought back in triumph, gripped by the neck. I told the cook I would not have any meat for dinner. I really must give up animal food. We manage to swallow flesh only because we do not think of the cruel and sinful thing we do. There are many crimes which are the creation of man himself, the wrongfulness of which is put down to their divergence from habit, custom, or tradition. But cruelty is not of these. It is a fundamental sin, and admits of no argument or nice distinctions. If only we do not allow our heart to grow callous, its protest against cruelty is always clearly heard; and yet we go on perpetrating cruelties easily, merrily, all of us ⎯ in fact, any one who does not join in is dubbed a crank. … if, after our pity is aroused, we persist in throttling our feelings simply in order to join others in their preying upon life, we insult all that is good in us. I have decided to try a vegetarian diet."

"To Indians the idea of the transmigration of the soul from animal to man, and man to animal, does not seem strange, and so from our scriptures pity for all sentient creatures has not been banished as a sentimental exaggeration. When I am in close touch with Nature in the country, the Indian in me asserts itself and I cannot remain coldly indifferent to the abounding joy of life throbbing within the soft down-covered breast of a single tiny bird."

"If you shed tears when you miss the sun, you also miss the stars."

"That I exist is a perpetual surprise which is life."

"The fish in the water is silent, the animal on the earth is noisy, the bird in the air is singing, But Man has in him the silence of the sea, the noise of the earth and the music of the air."

"God finds himself by creating."

"Your idol is shattered in the dust to prove that God's dust is greater than your idol."

"Life is given to us, we earn it by giving it."

"We come nearest to the great when we are great in humility."

"Every child comes with the message that God is not yet discouraged of man."

"He who wants to do good knocks at the gate; he who loves finds the gate open."

"Man goes into the noisy crowd to drown his own clamour of silence."

"To be outspoken is easy when you do not wait to speak the complete truth."

"Asks the Possible to the Impossible, "Where is your dwelling place?" "In the dreams of the impotent," comes the answer."

"If you shut your door to all errors truth will be shut out."

"The roots below the earth claim no rewards for making the branches fruitful."

"Time is the wealth of change, but the clock in its parody makes it mere change and no wealth."

"When we rejoice in our fulness, then we can part with our fruits with joy."

"The water in a vessel is sparkling; the water in the sea is dark. The small truth has words that are clear; the great truth has great silence."

"He who is too busy doing good finds no time to be good."

"A mind all logic is like a knife all blade. It makes the hand bleed that uses it."

"Praise shames me, for I secretly beg for it."

"Night's darkness is a bag that bursts with the gold of the dawn."

"Men are cruel, but Man is kind."

"The fountain of death makes the still water of life play."

"Those who have everything but thee, my God, laugh at those who have nothing but thyself."

"Do not say, "It is morning," and dismiss it with a name of yesterday. See it for the first time as a new-born child that has no name."

"Death belongs to life as birth does. The walk is in the raising of the foot as in the laying of it down."

"WE live in this world when we love it."

"Let the dead have the immortality of fame, but the living the immortality of love."

"When I stand before thee at the day's end thou shalt see my scars and know that I had my wounds and also my healing."

"We have our eyes, which relate to us the vision of the physical universe. We have also an inner faculty of our own which helps us to find our relationship with the supreme self of man, the universe of personality. This faculty is our luminous imagination, which in its higher stage is special to man.Tf offers us that vision of wholeness which for the biological necessity of physical survival is superfluous ; its purpose is to arouse in us the sense of perfection which is our true sense of immortality."

"The development of intelligence and physical power is equally necessary in animals and men for their purposes of living; but what is unique in man is the development of his consciousness which gradually deepens and widens the realization of his immortal being, the perfect, the eternal."

"The most important of all outstanding facts of Iranian history is the religious reform brought about by Zarathustra. There can be hardly any question that he was the first man we know who gave a definitely moral character and direction to religion and at the same time preached the doctrine of monotheism which offered an eternal foundation of reality to goodness as an ideal of perfection."

"It is for dignity of being that we aspire through the expansion of our consciousness in a great reality of Man to which we belong. We realize it through admiration and love, through hope that soars beyond the actual, beyond our own span of life into an endless time wherein we live the life of all men."

"Our village poet sings: “Man will brightly flash into your sight, my heart, if you shut the door of desires.” We have seen how primitive man was occupied with his physical needs, and thus restricted himself to the present which is the time boundary of the animal; and he missed the urge of his consciousness to seek its emancipation in a world of ultimate human value."

"I was born in what was once the metropolis of British India. My own ancestors came floating to Calcutta upon the earliest tide of the fluctuating fortune of the East India Company. The unconventional code of life for our family has been a confluence of three cultures, the Hindu, Mohammedan and British."

"There is no external means of taking freedom by the throat. It is the inward process of losing ourselves that leads to it. Bondage in all its forms has its stronghold in the inner self and not in the outside world; it is in the dimming of our consciousness, in the narrowing of our perspective, in the wrong valuation of things."

"The tendency of the Indian mind has ever been towards that transcendentalism which does not hold religion to be ultimate but rather to be a means to a further end. This end consists in the perfect liberation of the individual in the universal spirit across the furthest limits of humanity itself."

"It is widely known in India that there are individuals who have the power to attain temporarily the state of Samadhi, the complete merging of the self in the infinite, a state which is indescribable. While accepting their testimony as true, let us at the same time have faith in the testimony of others who have felt a profound love, which is the intense feeling of union, for a Being who comprehends in himself all things that are human in knowledge, will and action."

"Ah me, why did they build my house by the road to the market town?"

"I am restless. I am athirst for faraway things. My soul goes out in a longing to touch the skirt of the dim distance. O Great Beyond, O the keen call of thy flute! I forget, I ever forget, that I have no wings to fly, that I am bound in this spot evermore."

"We do not stray out of all words into the ever silent; We do not raise our hands to the void for things beyond hope."

"Please is frail like a dewdrop, while it laughs it dies. But sorrow is strong and abiding. Let sorrowful love wake in your eyes."

"My heart, the bird of the wilderness, has found its sky in your eyes."

"Let your life lightly dance on the edges of Time like dew on the tip of a leaf."

"To the guests that must go, bid God's speed and brush away all traces of their steps."