“Self-conquest is really self-surrender. Yet before we can surrender ourselves we must become ourselves. For no one can give up what he does not possess.”

The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves.

If you yourself are at peace, then there is at least some peace in the world.

The greatest need of our time is to clean out the enormous mass of mental and emotional rubbish that clutters our minds.

Love is not a matter of getting what you want. Quite the contrary. The insistence on always having what you want, on always being satisfied, on always being fulfilled, makes love impossible.

Ours is a time of anxiety because we have willed it to be so. Our anxiety is not imposed on us by force from outside. We impose it on our world and upon one another from within ourselves.

A life is either all spiritual or not spiritual at all. No man can serve two masters. Your life is shaped by the end you live for. You are made in the image of what you desire.

We live on the brink of disaster because we do not know how to let life alone. We do not respect the living and fruitful contradictions and paradoxes of which true life is full.

Fear narrows the little entrance of our heart. It shrinks up our capacity to love. It freezes up our power to give ourselves.

The man who sweats under his mask, whose role makes him itch with discomfort, who hates the division in himself, is already beginning to be free.

Pride makes us artificial and humility makes us real.

We are so obsessed with doing that we have no time and no imagination left for being. As a result, men are valued not for what they are but for what they do or what they have – for their usefulness.

A man who fails well is greater than one who succeeds badly.

Compassion is the keen awareness of the interdependence of all things.

Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone – we find it with another.

Gratitude takes nothing for granted, is never unresponsive, is constantly awakening to new wonder.

People may spend their whole lives climbing the ladder of success only to find, once they reach the top, that the ladder is leaning against the wrong wall.

I write all of my material. It’s all me.

I was desperate for new material, so anything I can write a joke about that works is in the act. No matter who it offends, or who it bothers – doesn’t matter if its something my wife hates.

I don’t like to do material people have heard. Now, they like to hear material that they know, because that’s the stuff that made me famous, and, unfortunately, I don’t do a ton of it.

Without the spiritual world the material world is a disheartening enigma.

I do not deny that many appear to have succeeded in a material way by cutting corners and by manipulating associates, both in their professional and in their personal lives.

I love the fact publishers are still publishing unprofitable material. It’s a challenge to the powers that be. It’s saying there is a real literature in this country and we will keep publishing it.

It is a question of sometimes choosing what is – in your own mind – of material importance and what isn’t, what might be a crucial potential penalty and what might not be.

But material success is possible in this world and far more satisfying when it comes without exploiting others.