“If mankind were all intellect, they would be continually changing, so that one age would be entirely unlike another. The great conservative is the heart, which remains the same in all ages; so that commonplaces of a thousand years’ standing are as effective as ever.”

Happiness is a butterfly, which when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.

What other dungeon is so dark as one’s own heart! What jailer so inexorable as one’s self!

Generosity is the flower of justice.

Selfishness is one of the qualities apt to inspire love.

Happiness is like a butterfly.

There is something truer and more real, than what we can see with the eyes, and touch with the finger.

What we call real estate – the solid ground to build a house on – is the broad foundation on which nearly all the guilt of this world rests.

What is the voice of song when the world lacks the ear of taste?

Nobody, I think, ought to read poetry, or look at pictures or statues, who cannot find a great deal more in them than the poet or artist has actually expressed. Their highest merit is suggestiveness.

Men of cold passions have quick eyes.

I have laughed, in bitterness and agony of heart, at the contrast between what I seem and what I am!

The trees reflected in the river – they are unconscious of a spiritual world so near to them. So are we.

Mountains are earth’s undecaying monuments.

A singular fact, that, when man is a brute, he is the most sensual and loathsome of all brutes.

Trusting no man as his friend, he could not recognize his enemy when the latter actually appeared.

We sometimes congratulate ourselves at the moment of waking from a troubled dream; it may be so the moment after death.

[On being indecisive and changeable:] On my gravestone I want inscribed: ‘On the other hand, maybe I should have lived.

We can master change not though force or fear, but only though the free work of an understanding mind, though an openness to new knowledge and fresh outlooks, which can only strengthen the most fragile and most powerful of human gifts: the gift of reason.

In science the important thing is to modify and change one’s ideas as science advances.

My life was an unending, unchanging midnight. It must, by necessity, always be midnight for me. So how was it possible that the sun was rising now, in the middle of my midnight?

Yes, I tried to change the classical style in a way that people who don’t understand it can enjoy.

I appreciate the change associated with people’s growth, but I don’t like the changes in our lives. I came to Mumbai in 1945, so imagine my acceptance of the massive changes around. I have witnessed every kind of revolution.

In my opinion, the biggest achievement was by Shankar-Jaikishan. With Raj Kapoor’s ‘Barsaat,’ they changed the way we looked at playback singing.

The only time a woman really succeeds in changing a man is when he is a baby.