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151. People skillfully conceal their own faults, yet they possess a remarkable talent for ferreting out—indeed, for excavating—the failings of others. Most of those who appear saintly at first glance are nothing but hypocritical devils in disguise.
152. If you have always been forthright, you might try an experiment sometime and discover the true nature of certain people. One day, speak with great humility and gentleness, and see what happens! You will find that some will mistake your humility for weakness and begin to attack you at will! Gentlemen are rare in this land; most people don't deserve humility at all. To protect yourself, you must display a certain false arrogance! I have seen many genuinely humble people adopt an air of arrogance. Generally, people respect fear far more than love.
153. For all that people say about inner beauty being the greatest beauty, in the marriage market they treat physical beauty—as if it were mere potato, gourd, or tomato—as the principal virtue.
154. When disorder becomes the rule, attempting to change that rule of disorder creates much new disorder. It is better to continue working within the system of that disorder itself.
155. Sometimes the sun sets in broad midday, even before evening descends. Such afternoons grow very long. Yet at the end of such an afternoon, the sun's light burns with extraordinary brilliance! If you know how to wait until that light appears, how splendid it feels when it comes!
156. Telling a well-crafted lie requires the most talent of all. It is a great art. People in the highest positions practice it regularly, as do those with no station at all.
157. There is much difference between "finding fault" and "pointing out faults." Fault-finders pick out flaws to expose them; well-wishers point out faults to correct them. When someone speaks of your mistakes, look carefully: what is their true intention? To demean you and elevate themselves? Or to show you your error and offer you the chance to amend? Do not hesitate a moment before casting the first sort of person out of your life.
158. If blood and semen are the very sources of life itself, how can these two sources of life be impure? The sense of purity and impurity arises entirely from belief and experience.
159. The Creator did not separately make Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, and Christians—He made only human beings. We ourselves have created these distinctions. If it were beneficial for someone to practice another faith, the Creator would surely have placed him in the house of that faith. Yet those who, playing God with God, urge others toward conversion—is there anyone more foolish and irreligious than they? If the Creator knows all things, He surely knows how each person will live their life and where each will go after death. If we believe in the Creator's existence, then who are we to speak of these matters or offer our opinions?
160. Some people are happy only when they themselves enjoy happiness while others suffer. Such people are rarely truly happy. Among them are those who don't need to be particularly happy themselves, but they must see others in misery! They are willing to sacrifice some of their own life's happiness to destroy another's. It is no small number of people who, because all their acquaintances' children performed poorly, do not take their own child's poor performance to heart in the same way!
# 161
Your true character reveals itself in how you treat those beneath you—those with whom you have no obligation to be courteous. Everyone shows respect to their boss; but that's mere compulsion, not character. If you weren't employed there, what harm in calling him "brother" instead of "sir"? We don't address the person—we address the chair he sits in. So the conduct within an office never truly shows us who a person really is.
# 162
You learn far more about a person in their defeat than in their victory. Victory chains a person in many ways, but defeat sets them free—freer than before. Then the real face emerges, clear and unmistakable. It is easier to know the defeated than to understand the victorious.
# 163
To succeed at something, it matters less to know how others succeeded than to know precisely *why* they failed—so you might consciously avoid those pitfalls. Yet remember this too: the very path that led one person to success can lead another to utter ruin. There is no universal formula for success. Each person walks their own road to the destination.
# 164
Success will teach you what failure teaches you ten times over. People advance in life chiefly by leaning upon their failures.
# 165
If religion did not forbid suicide, many in this world would not be alive. There is no denying this beauty in religion. People do not attempt suicide because they do not wish to live; they do so because, though they wish to live, they cannot. The will to live remains—but life has become impossible to bear.
# 166
People spend the finest years of their childhood, adolescence, and youth on education. The remaining years they waste fulfilling the duty to make others happy. Those very people for whom they sacrifice their own joy are the first to misunderstand them! Because they cannot live for themselves, in their own way, people remain unhappy throughout their lives.
# 167
If you are right, explanation is unnecessary. If you are wrong, explanation is useless. For this reason, unless truly pressed, never explain yourself to someone before whom you are not obliged to do so.
# 168
Crying must be done alone. Such solitary tears strengthen a person's spirit. To cry before someone you are not entirely certain of is to arrange your own peril.
# 169
When you laugh at someone's words, it means you like them. When you weep at their words, it means you love them. People shed tears merely thinking of those they love! Not all tears come from pain—the world's most beautiful tears flow from love.
# 170
The day you realize you no longer love anyone, or that despite your deepest wish you cannot love, know this: regardless of your age, mental old age has descended upon you. No helplessness is greater than the inability to feel love for anyone.
# 171
People love the listener more than the speaker, yet everyone desperately wants to be the speaker! If we wish everyone to hear us, why do we assume they don't wish the same?
# 172
If every mother and father in the world were honest, compassionate, and good—then whose parents gave birth to all the sin, injustice, and disorder in the world?
173. A profound silence births far more clamor than a hundred shrill screams. Where there is not a single mark, there gathers an entire fair of words!
174. To think that everyone in the world is bad except for one 'I'—this too is quite a remarkable ability! One can live with such severe mental illness and still survive!
175. More often than not, the moment money enters a relationship, the relationship decays. With those whose bond truly matters, you need never keep a single account of money. One rupee has destroyed many good relationships. It is terribly difficult to maintain a relationship with someone who lacks financial transparency.
176. If you wish to know what will make you happy, first conquer your loneliness. A person who is alone and miserable is unhappy either because of that loneliness, or for some other reason—but to uncover that reason, you must first free yourself from solitude. Loneliness blinds a person so thoroughly that they can no longer see even the most ordinary things clearly.
177. The joy of each chapter in life is entirely distinct. So if you wish to taste life fully, you must first learn to accept each moment exactly as it is. No judgment here, no reckoning of right and wrong. Life is as it is...until the end!
178. Those who do not carry themselves with them are always helpless in every circumstance. People wish to journey through the entire world accompanied by others, yet they forget to keep themselves in their own company. What is the use of possessing the whole world if you have lost yourself in the bargain?
179. When my problems arise entirely from my own doing, seeking their solution from others is foolishness. Most people merely enjoy hearing of another's troubles. We must remember this: hardly anyone in the world truly cares about my problems. Only if they are entangled in those problems themselves does it matter—and even then, only to a degree. Beyond that, truly, my death would move them not at all. If I stood in their place, the same would hold true. No one gives quality time without price or purpose. What one receives from those who do is hardly deserving of the name 'quality time.'
180. Men love to keep the person they love foolish. Women love to remain foolish before the person they love, even knowing everything. This game is truly one of love, though both sides secretly believe they have won!
181. Sometimes certain past experiences and time will force you toward cruelty. For those whose life has not traveled a straight path, cruelty comes easily and naturally. If you have not already taken as many blows and kicks in your life as I have, then please, do not come to lecture me about living. I am a senior master in the school you have never even sat in as a junior student!
182. In this world, there are things whose only solution is this: 'There is no solution'—which you must accept without words! Those matters with no solution, or whose solution would cost you dearly in other vital things—the more you seek a remedy, the more time you waste and sorrow multiplies. Nothing in this world is indispensable, so what is the point in going mad over one single thing?
183. Money has no power to measure the worth of human feeling! So never expose your emotions to those who weigh people by money's scale. Some people are such beggars of the road that they have nothing but a coin to their name. With such people, don't even come near with your basket of feelings—you'll only harvest sorrow. Touch them, and grief will find you in abundance.
184. The more precious a thing is, the higher the price of obtaining it. So there's no use in saying or thinking: I'm suffering so much, yet others are sleeping soundly—why should I labor so hard, why should I bear this pain in silence? More has never come free. The rule that you must give more to receive more bends for no one.
185. It is vital to become, as much as possible, someone you yourself can like. A person who doesn't even approve of what they are finds it nearly impossible to live for themselves or honor themselves. One who loves their work and station finds life bearable and beautiful. This is the alchemy of contentment.
186. Those who say time drags, that it has to be endured—they have no work of love or passion in their lives. If they did, they would spend much of life's hours effortlessly pursuing it. Creative people have no time to spare! Even their idle moments trouble them with a kind of guilt, thinking: I could have made something in this very hour.
187. Decorum should be mastered before freedom is claimed, or freedom itself becomes dangerous. What is decorum? It is expressing yourself in a way that you can carry that style with grace, and you know how to carry it even if the world receives it differently. It is poise—the knowledge of how to hold yourself.
188. We are really preparing ourselves to bear greater and greater suffering. Happiness means learning to endure pain. Sorrow doesn't actually diminish; only our capacity to accept it grows. When you learn to accept and adjust, pain itself begins to feel like happiness. By this measure, joy and sorrow are both relative. What feels like happiness to me may feel like suffering to you.
189. Our courage is our greatest strength; our fear and doubt are our deepest weakness. Nothing happens to what we fear, nothing happens to what we doubt. In between, only our mind's power weakens and we harm ourselves. Fear and doubt are the assassins of our own potential.
190. I hardly care what answer I owe the world. What I fear most is myself! I would bow my head to the entire world if only my head stayed high before my own eyes. For me, victory means conquering myself. I have no objection to the losses I must bear for this. To win the respect of my own conscience, I would surrender everything else.
191. Imbalance destroys the beauty of all things. What comes to hand when you reach for it should not always be grasped. And what doesn't come even when you reach, surrendering everything for it is equally wrong. In both cases, you may pay an extreme price.
192. Many have a burning desire to help others but lack the means. Many have the power to help but lack the will. To truly serve, one needs both the capacity and the desire. Yet most people claim to be praying for the welfare of others without actually helping them. This is the hollow piety of the world.
To do it is comparatively easy, and if one doesn't do it, there's no way to prove it either—hence perfectly safe.
193. The fewer expectations one harbors of others, the greater one's capacity to love them. Love that makes demands of expectation is accountancy masquerading as affection. One loves because loving itself brings joy—that is why one loves. But the beloved may find no joy in being loved, may they not? Love is not commerce, after all, where one must receive in exchange for giving!
194. Good people have an innate impulse: to whine into the ears of the wicked. This is precisely why good people become tiresome so swiftly. Most of the world's charming and celebrated personalities are, as human beings, quite base.
195. Behind the outwardly hardest hearts often lies the most tender one. People become hard because life compels them to. There is no shortage of those eager to crush the soft.
196. Until you learn to behave badly, you must endure bad behavior. Few are those who prize goodness. Nearly all petty people regard everyone else as petty too, and from such thinking springs endless pettiness. Whether you yourself are petty or not, show too much humility to the petty and you'll spend your entire life tolerating their pettiness.
197. First they will quietly sow their seeds in our culture; then, grown into trees, they will establish their cultural dominance among us. One day we too shall grow accustomed to losing our own culture. Then we shall see—blind though we are, we'll be quite content so long as we can hobble along with a walking stick!
198. If I don't keep my dirty clothes before my eyes, I forget they need washing—and so it is with everything!
199. To present oneself weakly before others is equivalent to dishonoring oneself. Yet if such weakness is itself part of a performance—a performance that conquers or preserves oneself—then such weakness is merely another name for strength. This world is full of twisted minds who delight in seeing others display weakness. If there is something to be gained from such a person, why not stage that weakness so effectively?
200. People err in their decisions due to lack of maturity. But the decisions made after error—those are sound! From them emerges the true truth. The greatest advantage of making a grave mistake early in life is that one can coast comfortably through the middle and end, dealing only with small errors.