Yoga is not a practice - the word 'yoga' means union. It does not mean standing on your head, twisting your body, or holding your breath. Yoga means to know the union of life. When you experience everything as a part of yourself, you are in yoga.

If you don't have the necessary inner balance, leadership can demolish you. Today, if you are a CEO by the time you are 35, you must have ulcers. By 45, you must have diabetes. By 55, you must have had a bypass. People say they have had three bypasses, as if it is a qualification.

Essentially, all life on the planet is coming from the earth. Whether it is a human being or an earthworm, it is the same soil.

For most human beings, if what they want happens, it is a success. If what they could not have imagined happens, it is luck. If what nobody could foresee happens, it is a miraculous existence.

The most fundamental strength of India is that we are a land of seekers. Seekers of truth and liberation. Not a land of believers. We are a godless nation.

The purpose of life is to explore one's own life to its fullest, to explore all dimensions.

Insight essentially means being able to see things other people are not able to see. This is the hallmark of leadership.

When the Divine descends, you just accommodate.

The reason for fasting is to understand the relationship between what's you and what's the accumulative body.

You can learn to prevent a storm, or you can learn to ride the storm. If you learn to ride the storm, the storm is not a problem anymore.

My vision for the country is to urbanise rural areas. What is available in the cities must be available in the villages.

A beard doesn't grow only on gurus; it grows on all men.

Success means at least you are finding full potential to who you are in terms of your intelligence, your capability and competence: you are finding full expression to who you are. This is important.

A guru is like a live road map. If you want to walk uncharted terrain, I think it is sensible to walk with a road map.

Communism is a way of thinking. Socialism is wimpy communism. When you don't have the courage to become a communist, you become a socialist.

Trees are our closest relatives. What trees exhale, we inhale; what we exhale, they inhale. They are half our respiratory system.

Even if the flower is no more, still, the fragrance can be.

I hear Shakespeare, sometimes, the way other people might hear God or Marx or something. But he's so different from that.

Shakespeare's always been sitting on my back, since I began reading. And, certainly, as a writer, he's who I hear all the time. And he's almost indistinguishable now from the English language. I have no sense of what Shakespeare is like. I have no sense of the personality that is Shakespeare. I think, alone among writers, I don't know who he is.

The magic word 'Shakespeare' always freezes you in your chair.

That's the great test: if you're going to be a great comic writer, not a humorist, you've got to take it into the throat of grief. Can you make laughter and seriousness so close that they are the same thing?

I always, always wanted to be a writer.

There was no question of ever sending us to Jewish schools... They wanted us out there. They wanted us to be lawyers and doctors. They wanted us out of the religious thing, apart from that ethnic bonding.

Passionate dissent from the will of the multitude should be respected, not derided.