“Love alone is capable of uniting living beings in such a way as to complete and fulfill them, for it alone takes them and joins them by what is deepest in themselves.”

The profoundly ‘atomic’ character of the universe is visible in everyday experience, in raindrops and grains of sand, in the hosts of the living, and the multitude of stars; even in the ashes of the dead.

Religion and science are the two conjugated faces or phases of one and the same complete act of knowledge .

There are a good many points about which I may be diffident, but when it comes to questions of Truth and intellectual independence, there is no holding me – I can envisage no finer end than to sacrifice oneself for a conviction.

I feel a distaste for hunting, first because of a kind of Buddhist respect for the unity and sacredness of all life, and also because the pursuit of a hare or chamois strikes me as a kind of ‘escape of energy,’ that is, the expenditure of our effort in an illusory end, one devoid of profit.

To our critical eyes, the threads of which the past is woven are, by nature, endless and indivisible. Scientifically speaking, we cannot grasp the absolute beginning of anything: everything extends backwards to be prolonged by something else.

Religion, born of the earth’s need for the disclosing of a god, is related to and co-extensive with not the individual man, but the whole of mankind.

Everyone, no doubt, remains first and foremost a man of his own country and continues to draw from it his motive force.

Death surrenders us totally to God: it makes us enter into him; we must, in return, surrender ourselves to death with absolute love and self-abandonment since.

The problem of evil, that is to say the reconciling of our failures, even the purely physical ones, with creative goodness and creative power, will always remain one of the most disturbing mysteries of the universe for both our hearts and our minds.

If there is one thing I fear less than everything else, it is, I believe, persecution for my opinions.

The most satisfying thing in life is to have been able to give a large part of one’s self to others.

To discover and know has always been a deep tendency of our nature. Can we not recognize it already in caveman?

The earth was probably born by accident; but, in accordance with one of the most general laws of evolution, scarcely had this accident happened than it was immediately made use of and recast into something naturally directed.

How great is the mystery of the first cells which were one day animated by the breath of our souls! How impossible to decipher the welding of successive influences in which we are forever incorporated! In each one of us, through matter, the whole history of the world is in part reflected.

A sense of the universe, a sense of the all, the nostalgia which seizes us when confronted by nature, beauty, music.

Historically, the stuff of the universe goes on becoming concentrated into ever more organized forms of matter.

I have always been a softie, and I fight it with every fiber of my being. Sadly, my being’s fibers need to hit the gym.

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.