A young plant should always be protected against goats and cows and th — Ramakrishna

"This maayaa, that is to say, the ego, is like a cloud The sun cannot be seen on account of a thin patch of cloud; when that disappears one sees the sun If by the grace of the guru ones ego vanishes, then one sees God"

"Man cannot really help the world. God alone does that — He who has created the sun and the moon, who has put love for their children in parents hearts, endowed noble souls with compassion, and holy men and devotees with divine love. The man who works for others, without any selfish motive, really does good to himself. There is gold buried in your heart, but you are not yet aware of it. It is covered with a thin layer of earth. Once you are aware of it, all these activities of yours will lessen. … Through selfless work, love of God grows in the heart. Then, through His grace, one realizes Him in course of time. God can be seen, one can talk to Him, as I am talking to you."

"Many are the names of God, and infinite the forms that lead us to know Him. In whatsoever name or form you desire to call Him, in that very form and name you will see Him."

"Knowledge leads to unity, but Ignorance to diversity. So long as God seems to be outside and far away, there is ignorance. But when God is realised within, that is true knowledge."

"God laughs on two occasions. He laughs when the physician says to the patients mother, "Dont be afraid, mother; I shall certainly cure your boy." God laughs, saying to Himself, "I am going to take his life, and this man says he will save it!" The physician thinks he is the master, forgetting that God is the Master. God laughs again when two brothers divide their land with a string, saying to each other, "This side is mine and that side is yours." He laughs and says to Himself, "The whole universe belongs to Me, but they say they own this portion or that portion."

"He who is called Brahman by the jnanis is known as Atman by the yogis and as Bhagavan by the bhaktas. The same brahmin is called priest, when worshipping in the temple, and cook, when preparing a meal in the kitchen. The jnani, following the path of knowledge, always reason about the Reality saying, "not this, not this." Brahman is neither "this" nor "that"; It is neither the universe nor its living beings. Reasoning in this way, the mind becomes steady. Finally it disappears and the aspirant goes into samadhi. This is the Knowledge of Brahman. It is the unwavering conviction of the jnani that Brahman alone is real and the world is illusory. All these names and forms are illusory, like a dream. What Brahman is cannot be described. One cannot even say that Brahman is a Person. This is the opinion of the jnanis, the followers of Vedanta. But the bhaktas accept all the states of consciousness. They take the waking state to be real also. They dont think the world to be illusory, like a dream. They say that the universe is a manifestation of the Gods power and glory. God has created all these — sky, stars, moon, sun, mountains, ocean, men, animals. They constitute His glory."

"History is a strange experience. The world is quite small now; but history is large and deep. Sometimes you can go much farther by sitting in your own home and reading a book of history, than by getting onto a ship or an airplane and traveling a thousand miles. When you go to Mexico City through space, you find it a sort of cross between modern Madrid and modern Chicago, with additions of its own; but if you go to Mexico City through history, back only 500 years, you will find it as distant as though it were on another planet: inhabited by cultivated barbarians, sensitive and cruel, highly organized and still in the Copper Age, a collection of startling, of unbelievable contrasts."

"I cant read ten pages of Steinbeck without throwing up. I couldnt read the proletarian crap that came out in the 30s; again you had sentimentalism — the poor oppressed workers."

"Fiction is history, human history, or it is nothing. But it is also more than that; it stands on firmer ground, being based on the reality of forms and the observation of social phenomena, whereas history is based on documents, and the reading of print and handwriting — on second-hand impression. Thus fiction is nearer truth. But let that pass. A historian may be an artist too, and a novelist is a historian, the preserver, the keeper, the expounder, of human experience."

"(reading) Golden Mist Cologne. Mmm, my favorite."

"I learned about renormalization theory as a graduate student, mostly by reading Dyson’s papers. ... From the beginning it seemed to me to be a wonderful thing that very few quantum field theories are renormalizable. Limitations of this sort are, after all, what we most want, not mathematical methods which can make sense of an infinite variety of physically irrelevant theories, but methods which carry constraints, because these constraints may point the way toward the one true theory."

"In the development of intelligence nothing can be more "basic" than learning how to ask productive questions. Many years ago, in Teaching as a Subversive Activity, Charles Weingartner and I expressed our astonishment at the neglect shown in school toward this language art. ...The "back to the basics" philosophers rarely mention it, and practicing teachers usually do not find room for it in their curriculums. …all our knowledge results from questions, which is another way of saying that question-asking is our most important intellectual tool… There are at present no reading tests anywhere that measure the ability of students to address probing questions to the particular texts they are reading... What students need to know are the rules of discourse which comprise the subject, and among the most central of such rules are those which govern what is and what is not a legitimate question."