Life is not accomplishing some special work but attaining to a degree of consciousness and inner freedom which is beyond all works and attainments.

If it so happened that I had once written a best-seller, this was a pure accident, due to inattention and naivete, and I would take very good care never to do the same again. If I had a message for my contemporaries, I said, it was surely this: Be anything you like, be madmen, drunks, and bastards of every shape and form, but at all costs avoid one thing: success.

Nothing has ever been said about God that hasn't already been said better by the wind in the pine trees.

The only unhappiness is not to love God.

In order to settle down in the quiet of our own being we must learn to be detached from the results of our own activity. We must be content to live without watching ourselves live, to work with expecting immediate reward, to love without an instant satisfaction, and to exist without any special recognition. It is only when we are detached from ourselves that we can be at peace with ourselves.

The truth that many people never understand until it is too late is that the more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer.

In the end, it's the reality of personal realtionships that save everything.