Real love is demanding. I would fail in my mission if I did not clearly tell you so. For it was Jesus - our Jesus himself - who said: 'You are my friends if you do what I command you'. Love demands effort and a personal commitment to the will of God. It means discipline and sacrifice, but it also means joy and human fulfilment.

If you prepare yourself to know the higher knowledge, then you will deserve. To deserve means to increase your capacity. You want to put the entire ocean in a bucket. The ocean is there. You can have it, but you do not have the capacity. When you deserve, you will have the capacity. The Lord, the reality, the truth, is always within you. You simply have to become aware. You can make sincere efforts to work with yourself.

Every effort to make society sensitive to the importance of the family, is a great service to humanity.

Full effort is full victory.

Is there a meditation that is not the ego trying to become? Is meditation conscious if every effort implies time?

Children, not a grain of the food we eat is made purely by our own effort. What comes to us in the form of food is the work of others, the bounty of Nature and God's compassion. Even if we have millions of dollars, we still need food to satisfy our hunger. Can we eat dollars? Therefore, never eat anything without first praying with humility.

Human efforts are of four types since there are four ends or objectives of life: Artha (wealth), kama (desire), dharma (religion), and moksha (liberation). The first two drag one towards worldly things while the last two lead one towards God. The first two result in one’s downfall and ignorance whereas the last two culminate in one’s upliftment and knowledge.

When effort is needed, effort will appear. When effortlessness becomes essential, it will assert itself. You need not push life about. Just flow with it and give yourself completely to the task of the present moment.

Great work requires great and persistent effort for a long time.

When the mind is relaxed, no longer making an effort, when it is quiet for just a few seconds, then the problem reveals itself and it is solved. That happens when the mind is still, in the interval between two thoughts, between two responses. In that state of mind, understanding comes.

Happiness is strange; it comes when you are not seeking it. When you are not making an effort to be happy, then unexpectedly, mysteriously, happiness is there, born of purity, of a loveliness of being.

Ideas by themselves cannot produce change of being; your effort must go in the right direction, and one must correspond to the other.

The mind is prone to be reactionary if not trained, and an untrained mind creates disorder, disease, and confusion. If one does something with full attention, he will increase his awareness and ability to perform his duty. If one forms the habit of attending fully to whatever he is doing, the mind will become trained, and eventually concentration will become effortless.

Life and love generate effort, but effort will not generate them. Faith-in life, in other people, and in oneself-is the attitude of allowing the spontaneous to be spontaneous, in its own way and in its own time.

My effort should never be to undermine another's faith but to make him a better follower of his own faith.

Do not make an effort to impress others. When you come from the self, your expression is perfect and your impression lasts for ages.

Emptiness is a symptom that you are not living creatively. You either have no goal that is important enough to you, or you are not using your talents and efforts in striving toward an important goal.

If you sit down and just keep quiet...you are in the state of Self-Awareness. ..keeping quiet means being without any techniques, effort or intention to meditate...not following the thought stream...not pursuing the senses, no imagination...such an intense Self-focusing comes without any effort...then, by itself...out of nowhere, wisdom and insights come.

But nirvana is a radical transformation of how it feels to be alive: it feels as if everything were myself, or as if everything—including "my" thoughts and actions—were happening of itself. There are still efforts, choices, and decisions, but not the sense that "I make them"; they arise of themselves in relation to circumstances. This is therefore to feel life, not as an encounter between subject and object, but as a polarized field where the contest of opposites has become the play of opposites.

The titanic effort that has brought liberation to South Africa, and ensured the total liberation of Africa, constitutes an act of redemption for the black people of the world.

Sometimes you may meditate for a few days or for a few months, and then you think you know everything, or you are frustrated about your progress and you quit. To get real success, you must pursue your efforts continuously.

Unless you make tremendous efforts, you will not be convinced that effort will take you nowhere. The self is so self-confident that unless it is totally discouraged it will not give up. Mere verbal conviction is not enough. Hard facts alone can show the absolute nothingness of the self-image.

We laugh at the efforts of the musk deer to find the source of the scent which comes from itself and despair at our efforts to find the peace which is our essence.