“The greatest mystery about a human being is not his reaction to sex or praise, but the manner in which he contrives to put in twenty-four hours a day. It is this which puzzles the longshoreman about the clerk, the Londoner about the bushman.”

Love is the one thing that can really sure-enough lighten all of life’s dark clouds.

We’re tired of hearing politicians and priests and cautious reformers… coax us, ‘Be calm! Be patient! Wait!

Is it possible that nobody has ever known that there never has been a completely civilized man, and won’t be for another thousand years?

My objection to the church isn’t that the preachers are cruel, hypocritical, actually wicked, though some of them are that, too .

We’d get sick on too many cookies, but ever so much sicker on no cookies at all.

The world and all its wisdom is but a booby, blundering school-boy that needs management and could be managed.

Why is it that traveling Americans are always so dreadful?

To be ‘intellectual’ or ‘artistic’ or, in their own word, to be ‘highbrow,’ is to be priggish and of dubious virtue.

A man takes a drink, the drink takes another, and the drink takes the man.

Most of us who work — or want to work — will always have trouble or discontent. So we must learn to be calm, and train all our faculties, and make others happy.

My chief objection is that 99% of sermons and Sunday School teachings are so agonizingly dull.

To a true-blue professor of literature in an American university, literature is not something that a plain human being, living today, painfully sits down to produce. No; it is something dead.

Writers have a rare power not given to anyone else: we can bore people long after we are dead.

Vast is the power of cities to reclaim the wanderer.

But the men of ritual and the men of barbarism are capable of shutting up the men of science and silencing them forever.

If travel were so inspiring and informing a business … then the wisest men in the world would be deck hands on tramp steamers.

We are all human beings, immigrant or non-immigrant. We all feel fear.

As a human being living one’s life, one is more open to relief when there is rain or the expectation of rain. That readiness for hope gets manifested in my stories and that of many other Indian writers.

Love, being in love, isn’t a constant thing. It doesn’t always flow at the same strength. It’s not always like a river in flood. It’s more like the sea. It has tides, it ebbs and flows.

The mind of an enlightened human being is flexible and adaptable.

It’s just people being people, the world being the world

The joke of it all is that you are looking from your true nature right now without knowing it. If you would stop being fascinated with the contents of your mind, you would experience what I am saying.

However much you love somebody, you should always keep a part of yourself to yourself.

Now the United States has to ensure that Afghanistan does not immediately collapse after being left to itself in 2014.