Do not pursue what should be, but understand what is.

Knowledge about yourself binds, weighs, ties you down; there is no freedom to move, and you act and move within the limits of thatknowledge. Learning about yourself is never the same as accumulating knowledge about yourself. Learning is active present and knowledge is the past; if you are learning to accumulate, it ceases to be learning; knowledge is static, more can be added to it or taken away from it, but learning is active, nothing can be added or taken away from it for there is no accumulation at any time.

That is, sir, there can only be communication, communion, when you and I are on the same level, and with the same intensity, at the same time.

Compassion being action without motive, without self-interest, without any sense of fear, without any sense of pleasure.

Ugliness is a lack of harmony, assuredly. And evil is the same thing of course.

In this country, unfortunately, as all over the world, we care so little, we have no deep feeling about anything. Most of us are intellectual-intellectuals in the superficial sense of being very clever, full of words and theories about what is right and what is wrong, about how we should think, what we should do. Mentally we are highly developed, but inwardly there is very little substance or significance; and it is this inward substance that brings about true action, which is not action according to an idea.

We have so committed ourselves in different ways that we have hardly any time for self-reflection, to observe, to study.