"Words are empty, so he can go on throwing them out. Of course, he can talk only to another blind man – no man with eyes will be deceived. People who are not enlightened can go on talking to people who are not enlightenedthe blind can lead the blind. And, of course, they can argue as well.

"Truth is not arguable, truth is not provable. There is no way to prove it, there is no way to logically propose it – it is at the most a seduction. You can seduce a person towards truth but you cannot convince him. Truth is very paradoxical, absurd. A man who does not know what truth is, is more logical, because that which disturbs all logic has not happened yet.

"You can talk more easily about love if you have not loved. If you have loved then you will find a difficulty at each step. How to express it? How to say the unsayable? The experience is ineffable; it is so vast it cannot be contained in small words. No container can contain it.

"The man who knows, hesitates. Lao Tzu says, 'Everybody seems to be very certain except me.' He says, 'I hesitate as a man who, coming to an ice-bound river, stands on the bank, thinks twice – and then walks very, very carefully. Everybody is walking so confidently.' Blindness is very confident because it cannot see anything; you can walk into a wall with tremendous confidence. Because he sees things, a man who has eyes cannot walk with as much confidence as a blind man.

"All great mystics are unconvincing. By the very nature of things they have to be. You can find a thousand and one flaws in their statements – and they themselves know that the flaws are there. For them it was just a necessary evil to speak. They had to speak. They would have avoided it if it had been possible.

"When Buddha became enlightened he remained silent for seven daysthis is a beautiful story from the Buddhist scriptures. The gods in heaven became very much worried. It happens rarely that a man becomes a buddha and even more rarely that a man becomes not only a buddha but capable of being a master also – this is even more rare."