“Every valuable human being must be a radical and a rebel, for what he must aim at is to make things better than they are.”

The present state of atomic theory is characterized by the fact that we not only believe the existence of atoms to be proved beyond a doubt, but also we even believe that we have an intimate knowledge of the constituents of the individual atoms.

Oh what idiots we have all been, this is just as it must be.

Predition is risky, especially of the future.

Truth and clarity are complementary.

No, no, you’re not thinking; you’re just being logical.

It is the hallmark of any deep truth that its negation is also a deep truth.

In the great drama of existence we are audience and actors at the same time.

We are trapped by language to such a degree that every attempt to formulate insight is a play on words.

The great extension of our experience in recent years has brought light to the insufficiency of our simple mechanical conceptions and, as a consequence, has shaken the foundation on which the customary interpretation of observation was based.

A person who wasn’t outraged on first hearing about quantum theory didn’t understand what had been said.

The measurement we get when we measure something is not a property of the thing measured.

If you think you understand it, that only shows that you don’t know the first thing about it.

I go into the Upanishads to ask questions.

In our description of nature the purpose is not to disclose the real essence of the phenomena but only to track down, so far as it is possible, relations between the manifold aspects of our experience.

If you have a correct statement, then the opposite of a correct statement is of course an incorrect statement, a wrong statement. But when you have a deep truth, then the opposite of a deep truth may again be a deep truth.

What is that we human beings ultimately depend on? We depend on our words. We are suspended in language. Our task is to communicate experience and ideas to others.

The violence and injustice of the rulers of mankind is an ancient evil, for which, I am afraid, the nature of human affairs can scarce admit a remedy.

When the power of imparting joy is equal to the will, the human soul requires no other heaven.

We should never desire to be over others. Instead, we ought to be servants who are submissive to every human being for God’s sake.

The misery we inflict on sentient beings slackens our human evolution.

A Hindu is interested in the welfare of all: not merely humans, but all living beings.

Human rights are fundamental rights, they are the minimum, the very least we demand. Too often, they become the goal itself. What should be the minimum becomes the maximum – all we are supposed to expect – but human rights aren’t enough. The goal is, and must always be, justice.

Never yet has a God been defined in terms which were not palpably self-contradictory and absurd; never yet has a God been described so that a concept of Him was made possible to human thought.

The savior who wants to turn men into angels is as much a hater of human nature as the totalitarian despot who wants to turn them into puppets.