“Shame is the lie someone told you about yourself.”

And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.

The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.

Nature forms us for ourselves, not for others; to be, not to seem.

My mission, should I choose to accept it, is to find peace with exactly who and what I am. To take pride in my thoughts, my appearance, my talents, my flaws and to stop this incessant worrying that I can’t be loved as I am.

I love your silences, they are like mine.

We are cruel when someone refuses to play the role in which we have cast him. We judge a person only according to his relationship towards us.

Your eyes make me shy.

Sometimes we reveal ourselves when we are least like ourselves.

Compassion for our parents is the true sign of maturity.

I believe the lasting revolution comes from deep changes in ourselves which influence our collective life.

When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow.

Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.

I want to do things so wild with you that I don’t know how to say them.

Each contact with a human being is so rare, so precious, one should preserve it.

I love the abstract, delicate, profound, vague, voluptuously wordless sensation of living ecstatically.

India is a country that shares the values of freedom, democracy, basic human rights and the rule of law with the United States and Japan.

The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition.

Everyone asks if a man is rich, no one if he is good.

Our virtues and our failings are inseparable, like force and matter. When they separate, man is no more.

To my mind, the life of a lamb is no less precious than that of a human being.

Religion is the impotence of the human mind to deal with occurrences it cannot understand.

I’ve been burned so many times I’m like the human equivalent of the inside of a roasted marshmallow.

Blushing is the most peculiar and most human of all expressions.