It is only when the mind is free from the old that it meets everything anew, and in that there is joy.

As long as the mind is seeking to fill itself, it will always be empty. When the mind is no longer concerned with filling its own emptiness, then only does that emptiness cease to be.

[on the secret to a happy, content life] Do you want to know what my secret is? I don’t mind what happens.

All authority of any kind, especially in the field of thought and understanding, is the most destructive, evil thing. Leaders destroy the followers and followers destroy the leaders. You have to be your own teacher and your own disciple. You have to question everything that man has accepted as valuable, as necessary.

Why are we such tortured human beings, with tears in our eyes and false laughter on our lips? If you could walk alone among those hills or in the woods or along the long, white, bleached sands, in that solitude you would know what meditation is. The ecstasy of solitude comes when you are not frightened to be alone no longer belonging to the world or attached to anything. Then, like that dawn that came up this morning, it comes silently, and makes a golden path in the very stillness, which was at the beginning, which is now, and which will be always there.

Freedom comes with self-knowledge, when the mind goes above and beyond the hindrances it has created for itself.

I hold that all the Teachers of the world have attained that Life which is the fulfilment of life. Hence, whenever anyone enters that Life, which is the culmination of all life, then he is ipso facto the Buddha, the Christ, the Lord Maitreya, because there is no distinction there.