All religions are designed to teach us how to live, joyfully, serenely, and kindly, in the midst of suffering.

God [is] not the exclusive property of any one tradition. The divine light [cannot] be confined to a single lamp, belonging to the East or the West, but enlightens all human beings.

Religion is not about accepting twenty impossible propositions before breakfast, but about doing things that change you. It is a moral aesthetic, an ethical alchemy. If you behave in a certain way, you will be transformed.

The constant reprimands made me hyperconscious of my own performance, and so instead of getting rid of self, I had become embedded in the egoism I was supposed to transcend. Now I was beginning to understand that a silence that is not clamorous with vexation and worried self-regard can become part of the texture of your mind, can seep into you, moment by moment, and gradually change you.

I remind myself that my pain is not unique. Everybody suffers.

Alexander's achievement was not the conquest of India, but the feat of actually getting there and his two years in India were more of a geographical expedition than a military campaign. .... a Greek army had reached what they regarded as the end of the earth. They had pitted themselves against the ultimate as bravely as the yogins had struggled to break through the limits of the human psyche. Where mystics had conquered interior space, Alexander explored the farthest reaches of the physical world. .... like many of the axial sages, he was constantly 'straining after more'.

I used to hate religion, I loathed it in my angry days.