“We must become so alone, so utterly alone, that we withdraw into our innermost self. It is a way of bitter suffering. But then our solitude is overcome, we are no longer alone, for we find that our innermost self is the spirit, that it is God, the indivisible. And suddenly we find ourselves in the midst of the world, yet undisturbed by its multiplicity, for our innermost soul we know ourselves to be one with all being.”

“So often, we believe we are alone in the privacy of our fantasies, but that is a delusion as well - and perhaps the most dangerous kind. For in letting ourselves forget about the common threads of our innermost wishes, we erode our foundations and lose the keystone of our souls.”

“A goal stood before Siddhartha, a single goal: to become empty, empty of thirst, empty of wishing, empty of dreams, empty of joy and sorrow. Dead to himself, not to be a self any more, to find tranquility with an emptied heard, to be open to miracles in unselfish thoughts, that was his goal. Once all of my self was overcome and had died, once every desire and every urge was silent in the heart, then the ultimate part of me had to awake, the innermost of my being, which is no longer my self, the great secret.”

“Ah, Harry, we have to stumble through so much dirt and humbug before we reach home. And we have no one to guide us. Our only guide is our homesickness.”

“No permanence is ours; we are a waveThat flows to fit whatever form it finds”

“What we can and should change is ourselves: our impatience, our egoism (including intellectual egoism), our sense of injury, our lack of love and forbearance. I regard every other attempt to change the world, even if it springs from the best intentions, as futile.”

“We kill at every step, not only in wars, riots and executions.We kill when we close our eyes to poverty, suffering and shame.In the same way all disrespect for life, all hard-heartedness,all indifference, all contempt is nothing else than killing.”