If you wish to produce a perfect rose, you must cut off the other buds which are spoiling the growth of the perfect flower.

There is always great beauty, not of images, feeling or thought. Beauty is neither thought nor feeling; it has nothing whatsoever to do with emotion or sentiment. There is fear. Fear is never an actuality; it is either before or after the active present. When there is fear in the active present, is it fear? It is there and there is no escape from it, no evasion possible. There, at that actual moment, there is total attention at the moment of danger, physical or psychological.

Intelligence is the capacity to perceive the essential, the what is; and to awaken this capacity, in oneself and in others, is education.

I say that when you have perceived or attained the goal, compromises, renunciations, do not exist. If you have seen the goal, compromise ceases to exist. It is then a question of a different attitude.

The Hindu, the Oriental, says that the physical is but the shadow of the Eternal, of the Truth; and he says 'In order to understand the Truth, I must let the shadow go, and not concern myself with it, but with the understanding of the Eternal.' So he does not concern himself with the physical. He is more concerned with the quality of mind and heart. Hence there is disease, there is disorder, and there is chaos and neglect and the gradual running down of the physical.

And the idea of ourselves is our escape from the fact what we really are.

As long as the mind clings to belief, it is held in a prison.