“If one burdens the future with one’s worries, it cannot grow organically. I am filled with confidence, not that I shall succeed in worldly things, but that even when things go badly for me I shall still find life good and worth living.”

Sometimes the most important thing in a whole day is the rest we take between two deep breaths, or the turning inwards in prayer for five short minutes.

The externals are simply so many props; everything we need is within us.

Our desire must be like a slow and stately ship, sailing across endless oceans, never in search of safe anchorage. Then suddenly, unexpectedly, it will find mooring for a moment.

Each of us must turn inward and destroy in himself all that he thinks he ought to destroy in others.

And now that I don’t want to own anything any more and am free, now I suddenly own everything, now my inner riches are immeasurable.

How rash to assert that man shapes his own destiny. All he can do is determine his inner responses.

Sometimes my day is crammed full of people and talk and yet I have the feeling of living in utter peace and quiet. And the tree outside my window, in the evenings, is a greater experience than all those people put together.

Sometimes I feel that every word spoken and every gesture made merely serve to exacerbate misunderstandings. Then what I would really like is to escape into a great silence and impose that silence on everyone else.

I really see no other solution than to turn inwards and to root out all the rottenness there. I no longer believe that we can change anything in the world until we first change ourselves. And that seems to me the only lesson to be learned.

One must also accept that one has ‘uncreative’ moments. The more honestly one can accept that, the quicker these moments will pass.

To live fully, outwardly and inwardly, not to ignore the external reality for the sake of the inner life, or the reverse, that’s quite a task.

I don’t want to be anything special. I only want to try to be true to that in me which seeks to fulfill its promise.

Sometimes I try my hand at turning out small profundities and uncertain short stories, but I always end up with just one single word: God.

If one finds the strength to deal with small things, one finds it to deal with the large ones as well.

Here, beside this great black surface that is my desk, I feel as though I am on a desert island.

There are moments when I feel like giving up or giving in, but I soon rally again and do my duty as I see it: to keep the spark of life inside me ablaze.

Is it just me or do the stars shine brighter when we are beneath them.

Nothing but heaven itself is better than a friend who is really a friend.

The character of a man is known from his conversations.

It is a great plague to be too handsome a man.

Power corrupts, but lack of power corrupts absolutely.

Nothing so dates a man as to decry the younger generation.

If any man thinks to swindle God, he is wrong.

I am a child of destiny who will unite East and West and change the world.