“When pursued with a pure heart, acting is an entirely selfless profession.”

As quoted in " A Film of One's Own http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/03/magazine/03actesses.html" by Lynn Hirschberg at The New York Times (September 3, 2006)

As quoted in Ramakrishna : Prophet of New India (1948) by Swami Nikhilananda, p. 80
Context: 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.

Source: The Technological Society (1954), p. 97
Context: A principal characteristic of technique … is its refusal to tolerate moral judgments. It is absolutely independent of them and eliminates them from its domain. Technique never observes the distinction between moral and immoral use. It tends on the contrary, to create a completely independent technical morality.
Here, then, is one of the elements of weakness of this point of view. It does not perceive technique's rigorous autonomy with respect to morals; it does not see that the infusion of some more or less vague sentiment of human welfare cannot alter it. Not even the moral conversion of the technicians could make a difference. At best, they would cease to be good technicians. This attitude supposes further that technique evolves with some end in view, and that this end is human good. Technique is totally irrelevant to this notion and pursues no end, professed or unprofessed.

Source: Sculpting in Time (1986), p. 241
Context: Perhaps the meaning of all human activity lies in the artistic consciousness, in the pointless and selfless creative act? Perhaps our capacity to create is evidence that we ourselves were created in the image and likeness of God?

Inspector Singh Investigates: A Most Peculiar Malaysian Murder, Cap 19
Context: But these quiet people, in their animal skin clothes with their diet of sago, were not to be left alone to wander through the lush jungles, living off the land, leaving no mark when they moved on, teaching their children the secrets of the forest. The greed of others could not co-exist with the selflessness of the Penan with their gentle humour and generous hearts.

"The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy" in Esquire (May 1961); republished in Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son (1961)

Source: The Stand

1790s, Discourse to the Theophilanthropists (1798)
Context: It was the excess to which imaginary systems of religion had been carried, and the intolerance, persecutions, burnings, and massacres, they occasioned, that first induced certain persons to propagate infidelity; thinking, that upon the whole, that it was better not to believe at all, than to believe a multitude of things and complicated creeds, that occasioned so much mischief in the world. But those days are past, persecution has ceased, and the antidote then set up against it has no longer even the shadow of apology. We profess, and we proclaim in peace, the pure, unmixed, comfortable, and rational belief of a God, as manifested to us in the universe. We do this without any apprehension of that belief being made a cause of persecution as other beliefs have been, or of suffering persecution ourselves. To God, and not to man, are all men to account for their belief.

2009 speech at the opening ceremony for Chekhov Studio International Los Angeles ( online http://chekhovstudio.com/2013/07/inspiring-quotes/ and books.google.com http://books.google.com/books/about/The_Spirit_of_Creation_Discipline_and_At.html?id=jqMInoDQoxMC)