Jaggi Vasudev Quotes

The question of bread for myself is a material question, but the question of bread for my neighbor is a spiritual question.

I often write about nonreligious people, and I try to find situations where their sense of humanity is restored or discovered. I think you can be a good person in many ways. And I think you often have to be careful that prayer can seem superficial, because it's a very complicated thing to love your neighbor as yourself.

Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.

Compassion has been advocated by all the great faiths because it has been found to be the safest and surest means of attaining enlightenment. It dethrones the ego from the center of our lives and puts others there, breaking down the carapace of the selfishness that holds us back from an experience of the sacred. And it gives us ecstasy, broadening our perspectives and giving us a larger, enhanced vision.

Love and Compassion are the true religions to me. But to develop this, we do not need to believe in any religion.

We all have the potential to show others love and affection, but as we progress in our materialistic world, these values tend to remain dormant. We can develop them on the basis of common sense, common experience and scientific findings. The response to the recent tragedy in the Philippines is an example of how such values are awakened; people helped simply because others are suffering and in need of support.

I see Jesus in every human being. I say to myself, this is hungry Jesus, I must feed him. This is sick Jesus. This one has leprosy or gangrene; I must wash him and tend to him. I serve becuase I love Jesus.

I really feel that some people neglect and overlook compassion because they associate it with religion. Of course, everyone is free to choose whether they pay religion any regard, but to neglect compassion is a mistake because it is the source of our own well-being.

To be rich is to give; to give nothing is to be poor; to live is to love; to love nothing is to be dead; to be happy is to devote oneself; to exist only for oneself is to damn oneself, and to exile oneself to hell.

As our kindness for ourselves grows, so does our kindness for other people.

Compassion is a spiritual technology.

Self-denial is taught much better by inspiring the love of our neighbor, than by the prohibition of innocent comforts and pleasures. Spirituality is much better taught by making spiritual things the objects of supreme desire, than by commanding an ostentatious avoidance of the enjoyments of life.

Successful people are always looking for opportunities to help others. Unsuccessful people are always asking, 'What's in it for me?'

My faith in humanity leads me to believe that people are looking for something more elevating than the sordid details of the intimate aspects of one's personal life.

A religious man is a person who holds God and man in one thought at one time, at all times, who suffers harm done to others, whose greatest passion is compassion, whose greatest strength is love and defiance of despair.

I recognize that I have the ability to be selfish, but I also recognize that you can't be happy if you only care about yourself at the expense of other people.

Real education should educate us out of self into something far finer; into a selflessness which links us with all humanity.

It is a glorious thing to be indifferent to suffering, but only to one's own suffering.

It's good to be selfish. But not so self-centered that you never listen to other people.

We have observed that, in society and the world in which we live, selfishness has increased more than love for others, and that men of good will must work, each with his own strengths and expertise, to ensure that love for others increases until it is equal and possibly exceeds love for oneself.

Most of us are consumed with our own thoughts and desires and are not always thinking about what other people may want. This is not necessarily being egocentric; it is just being human.

The world is so competitive, aggressive, consumive, selfish and during the time we spend here we must be all but that.

I would like to be remembered as somebody who cared a great deal about people.

For myself, suffering doesnt make me a good person; it makes me selfish. Why do we think that people who have less should find it edifying?

Sometimes you have to be selfish to be selfless.