That I should die next week, I would still be able to sit at my desk all week and study with perfect equanimity, for I know now that life and death make a meaningful whole.

Sometimes the most important thing in a whole day is the rest we take between two deep breaths, or the turning inwards in prayer for five short minutes.

As life becomes harder and more threatening, it also becomes richer, because the fewer expectations we have, the more good things of life become unexpected gifts that we accept with gratitude.

Despite everything, life is full of beauty and meaning.

We should be willing to act as a balm for all wounds.

Such words as 'God' and 'Death' and 'Suffering' and 'Eternity' are best forgotten. We have to become as simple and as wordless as the growing corn or the falling rain. We must just be.

Never give up, never escape, take everything in, and perhaps suffer, that's not too awful either, but never, never give up.

Each of us must turn inward and destroy in himself all that he thinks he ought to destroy in others.

I don’t want to be anything special. I only want to try to be true to that in me which seeks to fulfill its promise.

There are moments when I feel like giving up or giving in, but I soon rally again and do my duty as I see it: to keep the spark of life inside me ablaze.

How rash to assert that man shapes his own destiny. All he can do is determine his inner responses.

If you 'don't do politics', trust me - politics will do you.

The biggest regret a few years down the line would be…I wish I could. So dare to do what you dream of…NOW.

The ink in your pen never reshapes your thoughts, you must replace the ink before the ink can be inked properly.

You are the only author of your book that matters.

No great deed is done by falterers who ask for certainty.

I dieted all the time in the Sixties, but we had no idea what dieting meant - we thought it meant not eating anything.

Drop the veneer periodically and be like "OK, I'm an imperfect human. Let's try to get through this."

I always live in the present. I don’t know the future and no longer have the past. The former oppresses me as the possibility of everything, the latter as the reality of nothing.

No matter how much we scorn it, kitsch is an integral part of the human condition.

Never mind what I told you - you do as I tell you.