People do not seem to realize that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.

All peoples and nations are of one family, the children of one Father, and should be to one another as brothers and sisters.

The point is not to convert anyone to our view, but rather to help people wake to their own view, their own sanity.

If I stop preaching the unbiased truth due to fear that people will not like it, I am accepting the non-vedic way, rejecting the vedic way. Then I become an atheist and I lose my faith in the Supreme Personality of Godhead, who is the personification of truth.

Anything which must be understood by millions of people is so hopelessly divorced from how it is that it becomes a form of fiction.

Only an armed people can be truly free. Only an unarmed people can ever be enslaved.

Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws.

I just want to live as a simple Buddhist monk, but during the last thirty years I have made many friends around the world and I want to have close contact with these people. I want to contribute to harmony and peace of mind, for less conflict. Wherever the possibility is, I'm ready. This is my life's goal.

Speaking of Self-realization is a delusion. It is only because people have been under the delusion that the non-Self is the Self and the unreal the Real that they have to be weaned out of it by the other delusion called Self-realization; because actually the Self always is the Self and there is no such thing as realizing it.

As human beings we have unlimited potential and imagination. The worst thing you can do is be a conformist and buy into conformity. It's the worst possible thing. It's better to be outrageous. It's better to hang out with the sages, the people open to possibilities, even the psychotics. You never know where you'll find the geniuses of our society.

It’s not the body that people love, but the soul. The body is a temporary vehicle. Without the soul, the body is like a car without a driver. I see through my eyes, smell through my nose, taste through my tongue, hear through my ears, feel through my skin, think through my brain, and love through my heart. But who am I? Who is the witness, enjoyer and sufferer that activates my body?

It seems to be very hard for people to live with riddles or to let them live, although one would think that life is so full of riddles as it is that a few more things we cannot answer would make no difference. But perhaps it is just this that is so unendurable, that there are irrational things in our own psyche which upset the conscious mind in its illusory certainties by confronting it with the riddle of its existence.

Do not avoid contact with suffering or close your eyes before suffering. Do not lose awareness of the existence of suffering in the life of the world. Find ways to be with those who are suffering by all means, including personal contact and visits, images, sounds. By such means, awaken yourself and others to the reality of suffering in the world. If we get in touch with the suffering of the world, and are moved by that suffering, we may come forward to help the people who are suffering.

Watch how your mind judges. Judgment comes, in part, out of your own fear. You judge other people because you're not comfortable in your own being. By judging, you find out where you stand in relation to other people. The judging mind is very divisive. It separates. Separation closes your heart. If you close your heart to someone, you are perpetuating your suffering and theirs. Shifting out of judgment means learning to appreciate your predicament and their predicament with an open heart instead of judging. Then you can allow yourself and others to just be, without separation.

When we come to know who we truly are, we will see ourselves in all people.

Only people who carry the opinions of others need the support of others.

Freedom is meaningless if people cannot put food in their stomachs, if they can have no shelter, if illiteracy and disease continue to dog them.

Christopher McCandless: "I will miss you too, but you are wrong if you think that the joy of life comes principally from the joy of human relationships. God's place is all around us, it is in everything and in anything we can experience. People just need to change the way they look at things."

When a person is in a miserable situation, then, yes, it is difficult to develop genuine compassion toward others. That's why I find it difficult to say to poor people, "Please have compassion toward millionaires." That's not easy.

It is obvious that the only interesting people are interested people, and to be completely interested is to have forgotten about "I".

When people lose faith in the natural goodness of the human character, the lack of trust in spiritual goodness, that is one reason why corruption has become so widespread today.

Bend your minds and wills to the education of the peoples and kindreds of the earth, that haply the dissensions that divide it may, through the power of the Most Great Name, be blotted out from its face, and all mankind become the upholders of one Order, and the inhabitants of one City.

People in their handling of affairs often fail when they are about to succeed. If one remains as careful at the end as he was at the beginning, there will be no failure.