“The glossy surface of our civilization hides a real intellectual decadence.”

A beautiful woman looking at her image in the mirror may very well believe the image is herself. An ugly woman knows it is not.

Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.

Official history is a matter of believing murderers on their own word.

There is one, and only one, thing in modern society more hideous than crime namely, repressive justice.

Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.

Expectant waiting is the foundation of the spiritual life.

At the centre of the human heart is the longing for an absolute good, a longing which is always there and is never appeased by any object in this world.

Difficult as it is really to listen to someone in affliction, it is just as difficult for him to know that compassion is listening to him.

Equality is the public recognition, effectively expressed in institutions and manners, of the principle that an equal degree of attention is due to the needs of all human beings.

To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.

Pain and suffering are a kind of currency passed from hand to hand until they reach someone who receives them but does not pass them on.

Religion as a source of consolation is an obstacle to true faith.

Fortunately the sky is beautiful everywhere.

Everything which originates from pure love is lit with the radiance of beauty.

In struggling against anguish one never produces serenity; the struggle against anguish only produces new forms of anguish.

It is not through the way in which someone speaks about God that I can see whether that person has passed through the crucible of Divine Love, but through the way the person speaks to me about things here on earth.

The ultimate test of any civilization is how we treat the most vulnerable… what we do to our children. Our world has lost its direction.

In our civilization, and under our republican form of government, intelligence is so highly honored that it is rewarded by exemption from the cares of office.

The longer I live and the more I study the question, the more I am convinced that it is not so much the problem of what you will do with Negro, as what the Negro will do with you and your ‘civilization’.

No white American ever thinks that any other race is wholly civilized until he wears the white man’s clothes, eats the white man’s food, speaks the white man’s language, and professes the white man’s religion.

My own view is that this planet is used as a penal colony, lunatic asylum and dumping ground by a superior civilisation, to get rid of the undesirable and unfit. I can’t prove it, but you can’t disprove it either.

No form of theocracy, whether it’s manifested in a violent or non-violent form, is ever good for civilisation, and we have to challenge it in civil society as well as we would challenge Christian-based theocracy, or any other form of bigotry.

One could surely argue that the Buddhist tradition, taken as a whole, represents the richest source of contemplative wisdom that any civilization has produced.

CIVILISATION is not to be judged by the rapidity of communication, but by the value of what is communicated.