"Passion is a rather frightening thing because if you have passion you don't know where it will take you."

"All of us have been trained by education and environment to seek personal gain and security and to fight for ourselves. Though we cover it over with pleasant phrases, we have been educated for various professions within a system which is based on exploitation and acquisitive fear."

"Silence is difficult and arduous, it is not to be played with. It isn't something that you can experience by reading a book, or by listening to a talk, or by sitting together, or by retiring into a wood or a monastery. I am afraid none of these things will bring about this silence. This silence demands intense psychological work. You have to be burningly aware of your snobbishness, aware of your fears, your anxieties, your sense of guilt. And when you die to all that, then out of that dying comes the beauty of silence."

"Life is a movement, a constant movement in relationship; and thought, trying to capture that movement in terms of the past, as memory, is afraid of life."

"Space and silence are necessary because it is only when the mind is alone, uninfluenced, untrained, not held by infinite varieties of experience, that it can come upon something totally new."

"No one can live without relationship. You may withdraw into the mountains, become a monk, a sannyasi, wander off into the desert by yourself, but you are related. You cannot escape from that absolute fact. You cannot exist in isolation."

"It is truth that liberates, not your effort to be free."

"And the idea of ourselves is our escape from the fact of what we really are."

"Can you look at a flower without thinking?"

"The significance of life is living."

"It is only when the mind is free from the old that it meets everything anew, and in that there is joy."

"It's no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society."

"You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing and dance, and write poems and suffer and understand, for all that is life."

"It is really very important while you are young to live in an environment in which there is no fear. Most of us, as we grow older, become frightened; we are afraid of living, afraid of losing a job, afraid of tradition, afraid of what the neighbours, or what the wife or husband would say, afraid of death."

"It is only the innocent mind which knows what love is, and the innocent mind can live in the world which is not innocent."

"The constant assertion of belief is an indication of fear."

"Tell your friend that in his death, a part of you dies and goes with him. Wherever he goes, you also go. He will not be alone."

"There must be a certain amount of imitation, copying, in outward technique, but when there is inward, psychological imitation surely we cease to be creative."

"A belief is purely an individual matter, and you cannot and must not organize it. If you do, it becomes dead, crystallized; it becomes a creed, a sect, a religion, to be imposed on others."

"It is only in alert silence that truth can be."

"The question of whether or not there is a God or truth or reality or whatever you like to call it, can never be answered by books, by priests, philosopher's or saviours. Nobody and nothing can answer the question but you yourself, and that is why you must know yourself - Immaturity lies only in total ignorance of self."

"A man who is not afraid is not aggressive, a man who has no sense of fear of any kind is really a free, a peaceful man."

"One of the fundamental causes of the disintegration of society is copying, which is the worship of authority."

"A man who knows what it is to have humility is a vain man."