"It is both dangerous and absurd for our world to be a group of communions mutually excommunicate."

"At times almost all of us envy the animals. They suffer and die but do not seem to make a "problem" of it."

"Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone."

"Jesus Christ knew he was God. So wake up and find out eventually who you really are. In our culture, of course, they'll say you're crazy and you're blasphemous, and they'll either put you in jail or in a nut house (which is pretty much the same thing). However if you wake up in India and tell your friends and relations, 'My goodness, I've just discovered that I'm God,' they'll laugh and say, 'Oh, congratulations, at last you found out."

"But to me nothing - the negative, the empty - is exceedingly powerful."

"One is a great deal less anxious if one feels perfectly free to be anxious, and the same may be said of guilt."

"A priest once quoted to me the Roman saying that a religion is dead when the priests laugh at each other across the altar. I always laugh at the altar, be it Christian, Hindu, or Buddhist, because real religion is the transformation of anxiety into laughter."

"The common mistake of the religious celibate has been to suppose that the highest spiritual life absolutely demands the renunciation of sexuality, as if the knowledge of God were an alternative to the knowledge of woman, or to any other form of experience."

"No work or love will flourish out of guilt, fear, or hollowness of heart, just as no valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now."

"Stay in the center, and you will be ready to move in any direction."

"So then, the relationship of self to other is the complete realization that loving yourself is impossible without loving everything defined as other than yourself."

"It would seem that to be incapable of sitting and watching with the mind completely at rest is to be incapable of experiencing the world in which we live to the full. For one does not know the world simply in thinking about it and doing about it. One must first experience it more directly, and prolong the experience without jumping to conclusions."

"In known history, nobody has had such capacity for altering the universe than the people of the United States of America. And nobody has gone about it in such an aggressive way."