“We are so obsessed with doing that we have no time and no imagination left for being. As a result, men are valued not for what they are but for what they do or what they have – for their usefulness.”

If you yourself are at peace, then there is at least some peace in the world.

The greatest need of our time is to clean out the enormous mass of mental and emotional rubbish that clutters our minds.

Love is not a matter of getting what you want. Quite the contrary. The insistence on always having what you want, on always being satisfied, on always being fulfilled, makes love impossible.

Ours is a time of anxiety because we have willed it to be so. Our anxiety is not imposed on us by force from outside. We impose it on our world and upon one another from within ourselves.

A life is either all spiritual or not spiritual at all. No man can serve two masters. Your life is shaped by the end you live for. You are made in the image of what you desire.

We live on the brink of disaster because we do not know how to let life alone. We do not respect the living and fruitful contradictions and paradoxes of which true life is full.

Fear narrows the little entrance of our heart. It shrinks up our capacity to love. It freezes up our power to give ourselves.

The man who sweats under his mask, whose role makes him itch with discomfort, who hates the division in himself, is already beginning to be free.

Pride makes us artificial and humility makes us real.

A man who fails well is greater than one who succeeds badly.

Compassion is the keen awareness of the interdependence of all things.

Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone – we find it with another.

Self-conquest is really self-surrender. Yet before we can surrender ourselves we must become ourselves. For no one can give up what he does not possess.

Gratitude takes nothing for granted, is never unresponsive, is constantly awakening to new wonder.

People may spend their whole lives climbing the ladder of success only to find, once they reach the top, that the ladder is leaning against the wrong wall.

‎Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy.

Creativity has much to do with experience, observation and imagination, and if any one of those key elements is missing, it doesn’t work.

Imagination alone is not enough, because the reality of nature is far more wondrous than anything we can imagine.

Now in reality, the world has paid too great a compliment to critics, and has imagined them to be men of much greater profundity than they really are.

The pioneer scientist must have “a vivid intuitive imagination, for new ideas are not generated by deduction, but by artistically creative imagination.”

How potent is the fancy! People are so impressionable, they can die of imagination.

I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine.

As I say, I have never in all these years thought of the matter in quite this way; but then it is perhaps in the nature of coming away on a trip such as this that one is prompted towards such surprising new perspectives on topics one imagined one had long ago thought throughly.

It is rarely that the pleasures of the imagination will compensate for the pain of sleeplessness.