Great Throughts Treasury

"Crowds create illusions."

"Defense of human rights, equality and freedom is a matter of policy rooted in the gospel."

"Destructiveness cannot bring happiness; destruction is against the law of creation. The law of creation is to be creative. So Buddha says if you are destructive you will be miserable. If you are envious, infatuated, competitive, ambitious, jealous, possessive, you will be in misery. In Buddhist terminology there is nothing like sin, only mistakes, errors. There is no condemnation. You can correct the error, you can correct the mistake. It is simple. One has to leave the parents, one has to leave the home, one has to leave the past. One has to become totally independent, alone....trembling in that aloneness, but one has to become alone. One has to become absolutely responsible for oneself, and then only can understand the mind. If you go on depending on others, your very dependence will not allow you to understand who you are. ?"

"Death is a door to God. Those who know how to die know how to enter into God. Clingers clinging to life never know what God is."

"Domination is a sort of hatred, anger, enmity. How can you even think of dominating a person you love? You would love to see the person totally free, independent; you will give him more individuality. That?s why I call it the greatest paradox: they are together so much so that they are almost one, but still in that oneness they are individuals. Their individualities are not effaced; they have become more enhanced. The other has enriched them as far as their freedom is concerned. Immature people falling in love destroy each other?s freedom, create a bondage, make a prison. Mature persons in love help each other to be free; they help each other to destroy all sorts of bondages. And when love flows with freedom there is beauty. When love flows with dependence there is ugliness."

"Dogmas destroy friendship, destroy humanity and destroy the exchange of ideas"

"Don't choose. Accept life as it is in its totality."

"Don't avoid extremes, and don't choose any one extreme. Remain available to both the polarities - that is the art, the secret of balancing."

"Don't try to understand life. Live it! Don't try to understand love. Move into love. Then you will know - and all that knowing will come out of your experiencing. The more you know, the more you know that much remains to be known."

"Don't say this is good and that is bad. Drop all discrimination. Accept everything as it is."

"Each person comes into this world with a specific destiny he or she has something to fulfill, some message that has to be delivered, some work that has to be completed. You are not here accidentally you are here meaningfully. There is a purpose behind you. The whole intends to do something through you."

"Ecstasy is our very nature, not to be ecstatic is simply unnecessary. To be ecstatic is natural, spontaneous. It needs no effort to be ecstatic, it needs great effort to be miserable. That's why you look so tired, because misery is real hard work; to maintain it is really difficult, because you are doing something against the nature. You are going upstream ? that's what misery is."

"Drop the idea of becoming someone, because you are already a masterpiece. You cannot be improved. You have only to come to it, to know it, to realize it. God himself has created you; you cannot be improved."

"Doubt because doubt is not a sin, it is a sign of your intelligence. You are not responsible to any nation, to any church, to any God. You are responsible only for one thing, and that is self-knowledge. And the miracle is, if you can fulfill this responsibility, you will be able to fulfill many other responsibilities without any effort. The moment you come to your own being, a revolution happens in your vision. Your whole outlook about life goes through a radical change. You start feeling new responsibilities not as something to be done, not as a duty to be fulfilled, but as a joy to do."

"Energy can have two dimensions. One is motivated, going somewhere, a goal somewhere, this moment is only a means and the goal is going to be the dimension of activity, goal oriented--then everything is a means, somehow it has to be done and you have to reach the goal, then you will relax. But for this type of energy the goal never comes because this type of energy goes on changing every present moment into a means for something else, into the future. The goal always remains on the horizon. You go on running, but the distance remains the same."

"Enlightenment will be now the beginning, not the end. Beginning of a non-ending process in all dimensions of richness."

"Elie Wiesel says that the greatest evil in the world is not anger or hatred, but indifference. If that is true, then the opposite is also true: that the greatest love we can show our children is the attention we pay them, the time we take for them. Maybe we serve children the best simply by noticing them."

"Every being is unique. God never creates carbon copies, he always creates originals. He is truly a creator. He never repeats. But man goes on living in imitation. We are trying to be somebody else which is impossible."

"Every creature, a divine anthem is unique, unique, unrepeatable and incomparable"

"Everywhere there is joy and delight."

"Experience life in all possible ways -- good-bad, bitter-sweet, dark-light, summer-winter. Experience all the dualities. Don't be afraid of experience, because the more experience you have, the more mature you become."

"Except for our bodies there are no other temples in the world"

"Everything is possible. The truth is that the technology that has developed over the centuries is not only to make the mind forgets everything Old."

"Fame is foolish, it is pointless, meaningless. Even if the whole world knows you, how does it make you richer? How does it make your life more blissful? How does it help you to be more understanding, to be more aware? To be more alert, to be more alive?"

"Faith is not belief, it is love. Faith is not belief it is not half, it is total. Faith is not belief because there is no doubt in it, so how can you believe?"

"Faith is not rationalization at all: neither for nor against, neither this nor that. Faith is a trusting, a love."

"Falling in love you remain a child; rising in love you mature. By and by love becomes not a relationship, it becomes a state of your being. Not that you are in love now you are love."

"Find ecstasy within yourself. It is not out there. It is in your innermost flowering. The one you are looking for is you."

"Fill your heart with the creative power to accept the past, decorate the present and transform the future."

"For the church, the many abuses of human life, liberty, and dignity are a heartfelt suffering. The church, entrusted with the earth?s glory, believes that in each person is the Creator?s image and that everyone who tramples it offends God. As holy defender of God?s rights and of his images, the church must cry out. It takes as spittle in its face, as lashes on its back, as the cross in its passion, all that human beings suffer, even though they be unbelievers. They suffer as God?s images. There is no dichotomy between man and God?s image. Whoever tortures a human being, whoever abuses a human being, whoever outrages a human being abuses God?s image, and the church takes as its own that cross, that martyrdom."

"Find moments when you are not, and those will be the moments when you will be for the first time...really. So I am the white cloud, and the whole effort is to make you also white clouds drifting in the sky. Nowhere to go, coming from nowhere, just being there this very moment ? perfect. I don't teach you any ideals, I don't teach you any ?oughts?. I don't say to you be this, become that. My whole teaching is simply this: Whatsoever you are, accept it so totally that nothing is left to be achieved, and you will become a white cloud."

"First the husband tried to make the wife his possession, and once she is a possession he loses interest. There is some hidden logic in it: his whole interest was to possess; now that is finished, and he would like to try some other woman so he can again go on another trip of possession."

"Forget relationships and learn how to relate. In a better world, with more meditative people, with a little more enlightenment spread over the earth, people will love, love immensely, but their love will remain a relating not a relationship. If you enjoy being with somebody, you would like to enjoy it more and more. If you enjoy the intimacy, you would like to explore the intimacy more and more. But it has to be a commitment from one heart to another heart. It has not even to be verbalized, because to verbalize it is to profane it. It has to be a silent commitment; eye to eye, heart to heart, being to being. It has to be understood, not said."

"For thousands of years what men has done to women is simply monstrous. She cannot think of herself as equal as man. And she has been conditioned so deeply that even if u say she is equal, she is not going to believe it. It has become almost her mind, the conditioning has become her mind, that she is less in everything. And the man who has reduced the women to such a state also cannot love her. LOVE CAN EXIST ONLY IN EQUALITY, IN FRIENDSHIP."

"Friendship is the purest love. Friendship is the highest form of love where you do not want something, if places where sacrifice the same pleasure. One takes a portion, but not the principle, it automatically goes away. Man has learned to find the beauty alone. She always has a link to a bounce homeless, wants to be with someone - a friend, a father, a husband, a son, with one person... but the basic requirement is that the only way that you forget that."

"Friendship is the purest love. It is the highest form of Love where nothing is asked for, no condition, where one simply enjoys giving."

"Give you back to life. Allow life to take you, and not trying to lead the life. Let life take possession of you."

"God chooses first, then you start feeling a hunger for him...men cannot choose God, it is God who chooses man."

"Go inwards. Find your inner space, and suddenly, you will find an explosion of light, of beauty, of ecstasy -as if suddenly thousands of roses have blossomed within you and you are full of their fragrance."

"God is a person; godliness is a quality. You cannot become God, but you can be godly."

"God is just a name of the totality of existence."

"Heart doesn't know what doubt is, heart doesn't know what BELIEVE is- heart simply knows trust. Heart is like a small child; the small child clings to the father's hand, and wherever the father is going the child is going, neither trusting nor doubting. The child is undivided. Doubt is half, belief is half. A child is still total. Whole."

"God is not a person, it is an experience. The vision, the experience one has of the universe, of existence, after the dissolution of the ego-center.... When the "I" disappears, what remains is love. When the walls surrounding ego crumble, what remains is love. And that itself is also "God." Hence one cannot know God but one can become God."

"Here, start living moment to moment totally and intensely, joyfully and playfully ? and you will see that nothing goes out of control; that your intelligence becomes sharper; that you become younger; that your love becomes deeper. And when you go out into the world, wherever you go, spread life, playfulness, joy, as far away as possible ? to every nook and corner of the earth."

"How can you give something which you don?t have? To give it, the first basic requirement is to have it."

"Here, fire turns into water; here, the dancing of the rain declares the sun. There's no opposition in existence, no contradiction; everything supports everything else."

"I am bound, as a pastor, by divine command to give my life for those whom I love, and that is all Salvadoreans, even those who are going to kill me."

"I am going to be contradictory to myself many times for the simple reason that I am trying to bring all the religions to a higher synthesis. Different approaches have to be joined together. I am creating an orchestra."

"I am here to seduce you into a love of life; to help you to become a little more poetic; to help you die to the mundane and to the ordinary so that the extraordinary explodes in your life."

"I am not a logician. I am an existentialist. I believe in this meaningless, beautiful chaos of existence, and I am ready to go with it wherever it leads."