Nisargadatta Maharaj

When you go deep inside nothing is all there is. There is no 'I am'. The 'I am' merges in the Absolute.

I cried when I was born and I shall die laughing.

I cannot but see you as myself.
It is in the very nature of love to see no difference.

When I look inside and see that I am nothing, that is wisdom. When I look outside and see that I am everything, that is love. And between these two, my life flows.

It is only when you are satiated with the changeable and long for the unchangeable that you are ready for turning around and stepping into what can be described (when seen from the level of the mind) as emptiness and darkness.

What is in the world cannot save the world; if you really care to help the world, you must step out of it.

There is nothing impossible in the world if you are determined.

Each pleasure is wrapped in pain. You soon discover that you cannot have one without the other … Real happiness is not vulnerable, because it does not depend on circumstances … Real happiness flows from within.

The interval between the beginning of 'I am' (birth or waking) and when you lose it again (death or deep sleep) is called 'time.

When you are free of the world, you can do something about it. As long as you are a prisoner of it, you are helpless to change it. On the contrary, whatever you do will aggravate the situation.

Cooperate with your destiny, don't go against it, don't thwart it. Allow it to fulfill itself.

How does the personality come into being? By memory. By identifying the present with the past and projecting it into the future. Think of yourself as momentary, without past and future, and your personality dissolves.

Merely assuaging fears and satisfying desires will not remove this sense of emptiness you are trying to escape from; only self-knowledge can help you.

When you know beyond all doubting that the same life flows through all that is and you are that life, you will love all naturally and spontaneously. When you realize the depth and fullness of your love of yourself, you know that every living being and the entire universe are included in your affection.

It is this clash between desire and fear that causes anger, which is the great destroyer of sanity in life. When pain is accepted for what it is, a lesson and a warning, and deeply looked into and heeded, the separation between pain and pleasure breaks down, and both become experience - painful when resisted, joyful when accepted.