For common minds have an ugly ability to perceive in the deepest and richest saying nothing but their own everyday opinion.

The world is full of cowards, hence people stop growing.  With each new opportunity you shrink back, you close your eyes.  And because you cannot grow you have to find a substitute growth.  You can not grow, but your bank account grows - that is a substitute.  It needs no courage; it is perfectly adjusted with your cowardliness.  Your bank balance goes on growing and you start to think that you are growing.  You become more respectable.  You name and fame go on growing and you think you are growing.  You are simply deceiving yourself, your name is not you, neither is your fame you.  You bank balance is not your being.

Memory is a dead thing. Memory is not truth and cannot ever be, because truth is always alive, truth is life; memory is persistence of that which is no more.  It is living in ghost world, but it contains us, it is our prison.  In fact it is us.  Memory creates the knot, the complex called the I and the ego

Fear kills, want to kill.  Fear is destructive.  Love is creative energy.  When you love  you would like to create - you may like to sing a song, paint, write poetry, but you would not take a bayonet or an atom bomb and go rushing off madly to kill people who are absolutely unknown to you, who have done nothing, who are as unknown to you as you are to them.

If you are really spontaneous, people will think you are mad.  If you go to a tree and start talking, or to a flower, people will think you are mad.  If you go to a church and talk to a cross or to an image, nobody will think your are mad, they will think that you are religious.  You are talking to a stone in a temple and everybody thinks you are religious because this is the authorized form.

Remember that hate is not the opposite of love as people think.  Hate is love standing upside down; it is not the opposite of love.  The real opposite of love is fear.  In love one expands, in fear one shrinks.  In fear one becomes closed, in love one opens.  In fear one doubts, in love one trusts.  In fear one is left lonely.  In love one disappears; hence there is no question of loneliness at all.  Love is when you have known your inner sky.  There is no higher religion than love

What is fear?  Why are you so afraid?  Even if everything is known about you and you are an open book, why fear?  How can it harm you?  Just false conceptions, just conditionings given by the society - that you have to hide, that you have to protect yourself, that you have to be constantly in a fighting mood, that everybody is and enemy, that everybody is against you.  Nobody is against you!  Even if you feel somebody is against you, he is not against you because everybody is concerned with himself, not with you

Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members.  Society is a joint stock-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater.  The virtue in most request is conformity.  Self-reliance is its aversion.  It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.  Absolve yourself to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage fo the world.

Every decent and well-spoken individual affects and sways me more than is right.  I ought to go upright and vital and speak the rude truth in all ways.