“All we have to do is to receive what we are given…We are given the naturalness to love someone, to be calm in crisis, to ignore self-defeating suggestions, to be pleasant, forgiving, tender, helpful, unworried, brave, energetic.”

Don’t try to be spiritual. That is only a word in the dictionary. Make it your goal to become a normally functioning individual. Let these principles shape you according to your real nature of a simple, decent, honest, unafraid human being.

Who asks a king for a penny?

Do not mistake desire for love. Desire leaves home in a frantic search for one gratification after another. Love is at home with itself.

There exists a special self which takes every event as if it were the very thing you wanted to happen. That self is the Supermind, which is never upset by anything. Your goal is to nourish it into greater strength. Then, every step is sunlit.

You know what is right. Deep down, you know. The battle between your true wisdom and the counterfeit wisdom of society is what causes frustration. Refuse to compromise with what you know is right-with what is right for you.

The genuinely spiritual person is one who has lost all desire to be anyone but exactly who he is, without labels and without apologies. He is what he is and that’s all there’s is to it. Such a man is undivided, uncomplicated and contented.

We cannot be free of nagging desires through suppression. This is like trying to keep a rubber boat beneath the water. But we remove compulsive desires altogether by understanding their nature.

Freedom begins as we become conscious of it.

Interpretation blocks reception while masquerading as reception. Rightness does not need interpretation; it requires simple acceptance and nothing else.

All heartache is caused by wrong viewpoints.

The outer storm ceases the moment the inner storm ends, for they are the same storm.

Just as surely as distress must follow self-deceit, healing must follow self-honesty.

An obvious fact about negative feelings is often overlooked. They are caused by us, not by exterior happenings. An outside event presents the challenge, but we react to it. So we must attend to the way we take things, not to the things themselves.

Aloneness is a wise teacher. Kierkegaard remarked that one sign of spiritual maturity was the ability to be comfortable when alone.

Self-knowledge is the great power by which we comprehend and control our lives

Society is like a crowd in carnival costumes with everyone fearful that others will see through his disguise.

It’s just very hard to teach a class of students about what has happened in the Global Financial Crisis.

Institutions of the newer participants in global finance had not been tested, until recently…recent crisis have underscored certain financial structure vulnerabilities that are not readily assuaged in the short run.

This is not a time to quail, it is not a crisis, nor should we see it as an excuse for wobbling or self-doubt. But it is a moment for hope.

Life isn’t like coursework, baby. It’s one damn essay crisis after another.

I’m not panicking, and I’m not scared, I’ve been through the Gulf War, the Asia crisis, and the Russian crisis.

And that will mean that we cast aside eight years of hard work, blood, sweat and tears that have gone into bringing cities and mayors and communities to the table to address what truly is a national crisis.

When there is a crisis, the first thing that gets damaged and gets harmed is democracy.

I think to deal with the situation like human crisis, 65 million people being displaced, lost their home, and with such human tragedy, has to make every level of society to be conscious and to be alert about the situation.