“When the fruit appears the blossom drops off. Love of God is the fruit, and rituals are the blossom.”

Little children play with dolls in the outer room just as they like, without any care of fear or restraint; but as soon as their mother comes in, they throw aside their dolls and run to her crying, “Mamma, mamma.

So long as the bee is outside the petals of the lily, and has not tasted the sweetness of its honey, it hovers around the flower emitting the buzzing sound; but when it is inside the flower

If however, you once see your Divine Mother, you will not afterwards find pleasure in all these. Throwing them all aside, you will run to her.

That is very good. But never get into your head that your faith alone is true and every other is false. Know for certain that God without form is real and that God with form is also real.

When one becomes spiritual, the ego vanishes gradually on its own. A tree laden with fruits always bends low. Humility is a sign of greatness.

When one has love for God, one doesn’t feel any physical attraction to wife, children, relatives and friends. One retains only compassion for them.

Do not be small minded. Do not pray for gourds and pumpkins from God, when you should be asking for pure love and pure knowledge to dawn within every heart.

In mutual love the lover not only wants the happiness of his beloved; but has an eye towards his own happiness also.

Do yourself what you wish others to do.

The truth is that you cannot attain God if you have even a trace of desire. Subtle is the way of dharma.

Too much study of the scriptures does more harm than good. The important thing is to know the essence of the scriptures.

The winds of God’s grace are always blowing, it is for us to raise our sails.

Man needs a guru. But a man must have faith in the guru’s words. He succeeds in spiritual life by looking on his guru as God Himself.

The breeze of grace is always blowing; set your sail to catch that breeze.

The less your attachment is towards the senses, the more will be your love towards God .

That is to say, whose minds are not over-crowded with thoughts borrowed from others; and those who, after studying all the scriptures and sciences, have come to realise that they know nothing.

A star appeared…and was momentarily eclipsed by some movement.

Every novel is a biography. Well, then, this is a novel [The Paper Men] which is a biography that is pretending to be an autobiography. That’s what you could say about it.

Exile as a mode of genius no longer exists; in place of Joyce we have the fragments of work appearing in Index on Censorship.

The world now seems a stunningly ignoble place. It has not really grown all that much worse but appears to have done so because we know so much more about it than we did.

I don’t like tokenism. I don’t like the idea that somebody should just appear at a press conference or in a media interview because they are a woman.

Manners are a way of getting what you want without appearing to be an absolute swine.

Politics are not an instrument for effecting social change; they are the art of making the inevitable appear to be a matter of wise human choice.

The sunlit face of the earth would appear to shine by the light diffused back into space from the land and water-covered areas.