“All empty souls tend toward extreme opinions.”

Everything that’s lovely is But a brief, dreamy kind of delight.

Any fool can fight a winning battle, but it needs character to fight a losing one, and that should inspire us; which reminds me that I dreamed the other night that I was being hanged, but was the life and soul of the party.

Joy is of the will which labours, which overcomes obstacles, which knows triumph.

Choose your companions from the best; Who draws a bucket with the rest soon topples down the hill.

What man does not understand, he fears; and what he fears, he tends to destroy.

I cast my heart into my rhymes, That you, in the dim coming times, May know how my heart went with them After the red-rose-bordered hem.

It takes more courage to dig deep in the dark corners of your own soul and the back alleys of your society than it does for a soldier to fight on the battlefield.

I believe that our memories are part of one great memory, the memory of Nature herself.

Hammer your thoughts into unity.

I heard the old, old, men say ‘all that’s beautiful drifts away, like the waters.’

We taste and feel and see the truth. We do not reason ourselves into it.

Every conquering temptation represents a new fund of moral energy. Every trial endured and weathered in the right spirit makes a soul nobler and stronger than it was before.

There are no strangers here; Only friends you haven’t yet met.

Sometimes my feet are tired and my hands are quiet, but there is no quiet in my heart.

I broke my heart in two So hard I struck. What matter? for I know That out of rock, Out of a desolate source, Love leaps upon its course.

The mystical life is the centre of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write. I have always considered myself a voice of what I believe to be a greater renaissance – the revolt of the soul against the intellect.

The world is made up for the most part of morons and natural tyrants, sure of themselves, strong in their own opinions, never doubting anything.

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

It doesn’t matter how strong your opinions are. If you don’t use your power for positive change, you are, indeed, part of the problem.

The intolerant man will not rely on persuasion, or on the worth of the idea. He would deny to others the very freedom of opinion or of dissent which he so stridently demands for himself. He cannot trust democracy.

Everybody all over the world takes a wife’s estimate into account in forming an opinion of a man.

If you want to get your point across, you gotta cuss.

The tyranny of public opinion (and what an opinion!) is as fatuous in the small towns of France as it is in the United States of America.

In my opinion, being an all-rounder is good. It is not right that I should be content with qawwali and ignore other forms, since I am basically trained in classical singing. We should be masters of all forms of singing.