You can't fake comedy - it's not like a movie, where a director can just cast a pretty face.
The truth is, bad things don't affect us as profoundly as we expect them to. That's true of good things, too. We adapt very quickly to either.
Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished. The person you are right now is as transient, as fleeting and as temporary as all the people you’re ever been. The one constant in our lives is change.
Your emotions are meant to fluctuate, just like your blood pressure is meant to fluctuate. It's a system that's supposed to move back and forth, between happy and unhappy. That's how the system guides you through the world.
People are happiest when they're trying to achieve goals that are difficult but not out of reach.
We are happy when we have family, we are happy when we have friends and almost all the other things we think make us happy are actually just ways of getting more family and friends.
The brain and the eye may have a contractual relationship in which the brain has agreed to believe what the eye sees, but in return the eye has agreed to look for what the brain wants.
The world is slowly, slowly moving towards love relationships; hence there is great turmoil. All the old institutions are disappearing - they have to disappear, because they were based on the Iit relationship. New ways of communication, new ways of sharing are bound to be discovered. They will have a different flavor, the flavor of love, of sharing. They will be nonpossessive; there will be no owner.
In the West we have a tendency to be profit-oriented, where everything is measured according to the results and we get caught up in being more and more active to generate results. In the East-especially in India-I find that people are more content to just be, to just sit around under a banyan tree for half a day chatting to each other. We Westerners would probably call that wasting time. But there is value to it. Being with someone, listening without a clock and without anticipation of results, teaches us about love. The success of love is in the loving-it is not in the result of loving.
By the time we hit fifty, we have learned our hardest lessons. We have found out that only a few things are really important. We have learned to take life seriously, but never ourselves.
It is better to give than receive- especially advice.