Quotations

«The story the Leavers have been enacting for the past three million years isn?t a story of conquest and rule. Enacting it doesn?t give them power. Enacting it gives them lives that are satisfying and meaningful to them. This is what you?ll find if you go among them. They?re not seething with discontent and rebellion, not incessantly wrangling over what should be allowed and what forbidden, not forever accusing each other of not living the right way, not living in terror of each other not going crazy because their lives seem empty and pointless, not having to stupefy themselves with drugs to get through the days, not having a new religion every week to give them something to hold on to, not forever searching for something to do or something to believe in that will make lives worth living. And ? I repeat ? this is not because they live close to nature or have no formal government or because they?re innately noble. This is simply because they?re enacting a story that works well for people ? a story that worked well for three million years and that still works well where the Takers haven?t yet managed to stamp it out.»

«The marvel of the Bhagavad-Gita is its truly beautiful revelation of life's wisdom which enables philosophy to blossom into religion.»

«The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane.»

«The man form is higher than the angel form; of all forms it is the highest. Man is the highest being in creation, because he aspires to freedom.»

«There is no social entity with a good that undergoes some sacrifice for its own good. There are only individual people, different individual people, with their own individual lives. Using one of these people for the benefit of others, uses him and benefits the others. Nothing more.»

«The most beautiful philosophical song existing in any known tongue.»

«?The grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never dried all at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor is ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal dawn and gloaming, on sea and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls.?»

«There is only one way, really, to get into a state of living, and that's live! There is no substitute for an all-out, over-the-ramparts, howling charge against life. That's living. Living does not consist of sitting in a temple in the shadows and getting rheumatism from the cold stones. Living is hot, it's fast, it's often brutal! It has a terrific gamut of emotional reactions. If you are really willing to live, you first have to be willing to do anything that consists of living. Weird. But it's one of those awfully true things that you wonder why one has to say it. And yet it has to be said.»

«The Perennial Philosophy is expressed most succinctly in the Sanskrit formula, tat tvam asi ('That art thou'); the Atman, or immanent eternal Self, is one with Brahman, the Absolute Principle of all existence; and the last end of every human being, is to discover the fact for himself, to find out who he really is.»

«The Bhagavad-Gita is the most systematic statement of spiritual evolution of endowing value to mankind. The Gita is one of the clearest and most comprehensive summaries of the spiritual thoughts ever to have been made.»