“Good advice Is Rarer Than Rubies”

“It seems there is no such thing as a purely good deed, a completely right action. Even this task, which i took on for the very best of reasons, involves making choices that are not that "good", choices that might even be "wrong".”

“One either loves, or waits for love, or banishes love for good. That is the full range of possible choices.”

“I want more than what I want. (Vina Apsara)”

“Why obliterate the exceptional merely in order to make the outstanding look finer than it was?”

“He did not wish to be divine. If there had never been a God, the emperor thought, it might have been easier to work out what goodness was. This business of worship, of the abnegation of self in the face of the Almighty, was a distraction, a false trail. Wherever goodness lay, it did not lie in ritual, unthinking obeisance before a deity but rather, perhaps, in the slow, clumsy, error-strewn working out of an individual or collective path.”

“If you were an atheist, Birbal," the Emperor challenged his first minister, "what would you say to the true believers of all the great religions of the world?" Birbal was a devout Brahmin from Trivikrampur, but he answered unhesitatingly, "I would say to them that in my opinion they were all atheists as well; I merely believe in one god less than each of them." "How so?" the Emperor asked. "All true believers have good reasons for disbelieving in every god except their own," said Birbal. "And so it is they who, between them, give me all the reasons for believing in none."-- From "The Shelter of the World”