“Before becoming godín, Jaime worked for a miserable 79 mexican pesos an hour as a subject professor in one of the many universities in Guadalajara; very little for any future aspirations and very little for any present aspirations.”

Source: Red Mars (1992), Chapter 5, “Falling into History” (p. 276)

Source: The Heritage Universe, Summertide (1990), Chapter 10, “Summertide Minus Eighteen” (p. 119)

Quoted by Debbie Magee, in "Auroville — The City Of Dawn in South India (27 February 2009)"
Sayings

Farewell, p. 454
1920s, An Autobiography (1927)
Context: To see the universal and all-pervading Spirit of Truth face to face one must be able to love the meanest of creation as oneself. And a man who aspires after that cannot afford to keep out of any field of life. That is why my devotion to Truth has drawn me into the field of politics; and I can say without the slightest hesitation, and yet in all humility, that those who say that religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion means.
Identification with everything that lives is impossible without self-purification; without self-purification the observance of the law of Ahimsa must remain an empty dream; God can never be realized by one who is not pure of heart. Self-purification therefore must mean purification in all the walks of life. And purification being highly infectious, purification of oneself necessarily leads to the purification of one's surroundings.
But the path of self-purification is hard and steep. To attain to perfect purity one has to become absolutely passion-free in thought, speech and action; to rise above the opposing currents of love and hatred, attachment and repulsion. I know that I have not in me as yet that triple purity, in spite of constant ceaseless striving for it. That is why the world's praise fails to move me, indeed it very often stings me. To conquer the subtle passions seems to me to be far harder than the physical conquest of the world by the force of arms. Ever since my return to India I have had experiences of the dormant passions lying hidden within me. The knowledge of them has made me feel humiliated though not defeated. The experiences and experiments have sustained me and given me great joy. But I know that I have still before me a difficult path to traverse. I must reduce myself to zero. So long as a man does not of his own free will put himself last among his fellow creatures, there is no salvation for him. Ahimsa is the farthest limit of humility.

From a review of the revised edition of “The Elements of Style” by William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White published in Esquire, November 1959.

Tighe Hopkins in The Women Napoleon Loved
About

Lecture 1B, 8:20
Mythology and the Individual (1997)
Context: All cultures … have grown out of myths. They are founded on myths. What these myths have given has been inspiration for aspiration. The economic interpretation of history is for the birds. Economics is itself a function of aspiration. It’s what people aspire to that creates the field in which economics works.

In response to the question about Ship of Theseus: "What do you expect audiences to get out of this film?", in "The Intersection of Cinema, Art, and Existential Philosophy" by Girija Sankar, in Khabar (May 2014) http://www.khabar.com/magazine/features/the_intersection_of_cinema_art_and_existential_philosophy
Context: One singular aspiration in all my work is to attain the state of awe. And what is awe? Awe is when you come across something that is infinitely complex and inexplicable by all your memory and thought systems — and yet comprehensible in a singular gasp of experience. It is an incredibly important emotion for me - the inexplicable is an invitation to engage with the cosmic void that humanity has been in a constant dialogue with for 250,000 years. And for the longest time, the void hasn’t answered back. In the last century, we have steadily found relevant answers, exponentially accumulating and organising into a more holistic meaning. A century ago the narrative was (and it still is, in many places) that if we probe too much into our universe and selves, we would lose out on our capacity of wonder, but exactly the reverse that has happened. When we’ve looked into the molecule we found the atom and when we looked into the atom we found the electron and when we’ve looked at the electron we have experienced sheer awe at its quantum probabilistic nature. So each time the scope of awe has expanded— expanding with it, our foresight, worldview and free will — for me, a film has to grasp that, and translate that experience.

2014, "GhoshanaPatra with Narendra Modi", 2014
Context: I think this is a very dirty question [asked about Robert Vadra]. On one hand, no one is above the law. Suppose there is an allegation against Narendra Modi, and suppose tomorrow Narendra Modi becomes the Prime Minister, then should the case against him be initiated or not; just because I became the Prime Minister everything be closed. It cannot be like that, right? I am not above anyone. But I am talking about myself here, not the person you asked about, don’t mix it up, I am sure you won’t play the news trader gimmick. I have 14 years to experience of running a government. I tell you, I have never opened anyone’s file ever. It is my opinion that I got involved in all that then I would just have gotten more lost in it and would have been unable to do any good work. This is my personal opinion, I am not telling this as a government policy. I have separated myself from all this in 14 years and gave support only to new positive initiatives. I am not even aware of them, they are old things and must be in progress, the government knows it’s work. We come in for five years, if we start lugging this garbage [e. g., old corruption cases] around then when will we [have time to] do some good work[? ] So it is my opinion that my energies not be wasted in garbage. My energies should be directed towards good constructive work. Five years is very little time, if we get caught elsewhere then how will we do any good for the country. Rest [of] the law [e. g., the judiciary] should take its own course.