"That's why religion disappears from your life whenever there is no suffering. Then you never go to the temple, it carries no sense for you; then you don't pray to God, because why pray? There seems to be no reason.

"Whenever there is suffering you move toward the temple, your eyes move toward God, your heart moves toward prayer. There is something hidden in suffering which makes you more aware who you are, why you are, where you are going. In a moment of suffering your awareness is intense.

"Nothing can be meaningless in this world. It is a cosmos, it is not a chaos. You may not be able to understand – that's another thing – because you know only fragments, you don't know the whole. Your experience of life is just as if you have only one tattered page of a novel: you read it but it makes no sense because it is just a small fragment, you don't know the whole story. Once you know the whole story, then that page will become comprehensible, then that page becomes coherent, meaningful.

"What is meaning? Meaning means to know the fragment in relation to the whole; meaning is a relationship of the fragment to the whole. A madman talking on the street is meaningless. Why? – because you cannot relate his talk to anything, his talk is a fragment. But he is not talking to anybody; there is no need, there is nobody there to talk to. His talk is fragmentary, it is not part of a bigger whole, that is why it is incoherent. The same words may be used by another man – exactly the same words – but he is talking to somebody, then it is meaningful. Why? The words are the same, the sentences the same, the gestures the same, and one man you say is mad and the other man is not mad. Why? – because there is somebody to listen; the fragment is not fragmentary, it has become part of a bigger whole, it carries meaning.

"Cut a piece out of a Picasso painting; it is meaningless, it is just a fragment and a fragment is dead. Put it back into the painting and suddenly the meaning appears; it has become coherent because now it has become part of the whole."