The true worth of a man is not to be found in man himself, but in the colours and textures that come alive in others.

The great fault of all ethics hitherto has been that they believed themselves to have to deal only with the relations of man to man. In reality, however, the question is what is his attitude to the world and all life that comes within his reach.

If a man loses his reverence for any part of life, he will lose his reverence for all of life.

Ethics is the activity of man directed to secure the inner perfection of his own personality.

To the truly ethical man, all of life is sacred, including forms of life that from the human point of view may seem lower than ours.

Man's ethics must not end with man, but should extend to the universe. He must regain the consciousness of the great Chain of Life from which he cannot be separated.

A thinking man feels compelled to approach all life with the same reverence he has for his own.

The thinking man must oppose all cruel customs no matter how deeply rooted in tradition or surrounded by a halo. We need a boundless ethics which will include the animals also. My life is full of meaning to me. The life around me must be full of significance to it. If I want others to respect my life, then I must respect the other life I see however strange it may be to mine. Ethics in our western world has hitherto been largely limited to the relation of man to man... but that is a limited ethics.

Who can describe the injustice and the cruelties that in the course of centuries the peoples of color of the world have suffered at the hands of Europeans?... We and our civilization are burdened, really, with a great debt. We are not free to confer benefits on these men, or not, as we please; it is our duty. Anything we give them is not benevolence but atonement.