“Renunciation of objects, without the renunciation of desires, is short-lived, however hard you may try.”

“Sympathy is what you have for someone after they die, pity you have for someone when they don't have a date to the biggest dance of the year. Empathy is what I do to you when you judge me. Envy is having pity on yourself. Can you discern the rest for yourself?”

“The greatness of humanity is not in being human, but in being humane.”

“A person who believes in fighting and does not regard it as violence, though it is violence, is here being asked to kill.”

“I do not want my house to be walled in on all sides and my windows to be stuffed. I want the culture of all lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown off my feet by any”

“Jangan bekerja sama dengan kejahatan,  sebab kewajiban kita adalah bekerja sama dengan kebaikan.”

“An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind.”

“The credit system has encircled this beautiful globe of ours like a serpent's coil, and if we do not mind, it bids fair to crush us out of breath.”

“My experience has shown me that we win justice quickest by rendering justice to the other party.”

“My difficulties lay deeper. It was more than I could believe that Jesus was the only incarnate son of God, and that only he who believed in him would have everlasting life. If God could have sons, all of us were His sons. If Jesus was like God, or God Himself, then all men were like God and could be God Himself. My reason was not ready to believe literally that Jesus by his death and by his blood redeemed the sins of the world. Metaphorically there might be some truth in it. Again, according to Christianity only human beings had souls, and not other living beings, for whom death meant complete extinction; while I held a contrary belief. I could accept Jesus as a martyr, an embodiment of sacrifice, and a divine teacher, but not as the most perfect man ever born. His death on the Cross was a great example to the world, but that there was anything like a mysterious or miraculous virtue in it my heart could not accept. The pious lives of Christians did not give me anything that the lives of men of other faiths had failed to give. I had seen in other lives just the same reformation that I had heard of among Christians. Philosophically there was nothing extraordinary in Christian principles. From the point of view of sacrifice, it seemed to me that the Hindus greatly surpassed the Christians. It was impossible for me to regard Christianity as a perfect religion or the greatest of all religions.”

“I hold that it is the duty of every cultured man or woman to read  sympathetically the scriptures of the world. If we are to respect others' religions as we would have them to respect our own, a friendly study of the world's religions is a sacred duty.”

“Truth resides in every human heart, and one has to search for it there, and to be guided by truth as one sees it. But no one has a right to coerce others to act according to his own view of truth.

“What does it matter to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?”

“The moment there is suspicion about a person's motives, everything he does becomes tainted.”

“Where there is possessiveness, there is violence.”