“As a well cut diamond has many facets, each reflecting a different color of light, so does the word yoga, each facet reflecting a different shade of meaning and revealing different aspects of the entire range of human endeavor to win inner peace and happiness.”

The ultimate goal of yoga is to realize the brilliance of your soul.

Yoga has to be done with the intellect of the head as well as the intellect of the heart

You have to create love and affection for your body, for what it can do for you. Love must be incarnated in the smallest pore of the skin, the smallest cell of the body to make them intelligent so they can collaborate with all the other ones, in the big republic of the body. This love must radiate from you to others.

During inhalation, the breath should move exactly like clouds spreading in the sky.

First yoga deals with health, strength and conquest of the body. Next, it lifts the veil of difference between the body and the mind. Lastly, it leads the Sadhaka to peace and unalloyed purity.

The Yogi conquers the body by the practice of asanas, making the body a fit vehicle for the spirit. The Yogi knows that it is a necessary vehicle for the spirit, for a soul without a body is like a bird deprived of its power to fly.

As breath stills our mind, our energies are free to unhook from the senses and bend inward.

Anything physical is always changing, therefore, its reality is not constant, not eternal.

I always tell people, live happily and die majestically.

I don’t stretch my body as if it is an object. I do yoga from the self towards the body, not the other way around.

The aim of yoga is to calm the chaos of conflicting impulses.

When stability becomes a habit, maturity and clarity follow.

Yoga allows you to rediscover a sense of wholeness in your life.

Love begets courage, moderation creates abundance and humility generates power

It is through the alignment of the body that I discovered the alignment of my mind, self, and intelligence.

Yoga allows you to find a new kind of freedom that you may not have known even existed.

I have always had strong maternal instincts.

I was nineteen and I put a bowl on and I said, Cut around! Because it was not the fashion at the time when I did that hairdo – and I kept it all my life!

There is something fearfully strengthening about cutting free even if the ties bandage the heart itself.

In [family snapshots] the flow of profane time has been stopped and a sacred interval of self-conscious revelation has been cut from it by the edge of the picture frame and the light of the sun or the flash.

A decade of cutting away dead flesh, cauterizing old scars ripped open over and over and still it is not enough.

Each of us is carving a stone, erecting a column, or cutting a piece of stained glass in the construction of something much bigger than ourselves.

Energy has to be fed from a source. If you don’t feed the source, it dissipates entirely.

I’ve never really felt that I’ve had the right hair cut, or had the right clothes.