Top 40 Khushwant Singh Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Morality is a matter of money. Poor people cannot afford to have morals. So they have religion.”

— Khushwant Singh

2. “Men have many faults, women only two: Everything they say, and everything they do.”

— Khushwant Singh

3. “Not forever does the bulbul sing In balmy shades of bowers, Not forever lasts the spring Nor ever blossom the flowers. Not forever reigneth joy, Sets the sun on days of bliss, Friendships not forever last, They know not life, who know not this.”

— Khushwant Singh

4. “Your principle should be to see everything and say nothing. The world changes so rapidly that if you want to get on you cannot afford to align yourself with any person or point of view.”

— Khushwant Singh

5. “No one has invented a condom for the pen yet.”

— Khushwant Singh

6. “The doer must do only when the receiver is ready to receive. Otherwise, the act is wasted.”

— Khushwant Singh

7. “When the world is itself draped in the mantle of night, the mirror of the mind is like the sky in which thoughts twinkle like stars.”

— Khushwant Singh

8. “Freedom is for the educated people who fought for it. We were slaves of the English, now we will be slaves of the educated Indians – or the Pakistanis.”

— Khushwant Singh

9. “The last to learn of gossip are the parties concerned.”

— Khushwant Singh

10. “We are of the mysterious East. No proof, just faith. No reason, just faith.”

— Khushwant Singh

11. “You have only one life to live. Live it to the full. Time flies as fast as a bird on the wing.”

— Khushwant Singh

12. “In America, they make a lot of fuss over little things.”

— Khushwant Singh

13. “The world forgives a drunkard.”

— Khushwant Singh

14. “Love is an elusive concept and means different things to different people.”

— Khushwant Singh

15. “So many gods, so many creeds, so many paths that wind and wind When just the art of being kind is all that the sad world needs.”

— Khushwant Singh

16. “Oh the gladness of her gladness when she’s glad, And the sadness of her sadness when she’s sad; But the gladness of her gladness, And the sadness of her sadness, Are as nothing, Charles, To the badness of her badness when she is bad.”

— Khushwant Singh

17. “Poor people cannot afford to have morals. So they have religion.”

— Khushwant Singh

18. “What the four seasons of the year mean to the European, the one season of the monsoon means to the Indian. It is preceded by desolation; it brings with it hopes of spring; it has the fullness of summer and the fulfillment of autumn all in one.”

— Khushwant Singh

19. “To know India and her peoples, one has to know the monsoon. one has to know the monsoon. It is not enough to read about it in books, or see it on the cinema screen, or hear someone talk about it. It has to be a personal experience because nothing short of living through it can fully convey all it means to a people for whom it is not only the source of life, but also their most exciting impact with nature.”

— Khushwant Singh

20. “India is constipated with a lot of humbug. Take religion. For the Hindu, it means little besides caste and cow-protection. For the Muslim, circumcision and kosher meat. For the Sikh, long hair and hatred of the Muslim. For the Christian, Hinduism with a sola topee. For the Parsi, fire-worship and feeding vultures. Ethics, which should be the kernel of a religious code, has been carefully removed.”

— Khushwant Singh

21. “A Sikh woman takes the surname Kaur on baptism. Kaur was also a common surname for Rajput women and means both a princess and lioness.”

— Khushwant Singh

22. “To plant your idea in someone’s head. To plant someone’s money in your own pocket. He who succeeds in the former, we call teacher. He who succeeds with the latter, we call boss. The one who succeeds in both, we call wife. The one who fails in both, we call husband.”

— Khushwant Singh

23. “When you have counted eighty years and more, Time and Fate will batter at your door; But if you should survive to be a hundred, Your life will be death to the very core.”

— Khushwant Singh

24. “As I had studied the poetry of Rumi, Jami, Nizami, Hafiz and Amir Khusrau, with some difficulty in the original Persian, and with some ease in various English translations, I realised that Nanak had absorbed the ethos of Islamic poetical mysticism, inherited the belief in ecstasy of union of Baba Farid, Nizam-ud-Din Aulia and Kabir. Of.”

— Khushwant Singh

25. “His mind was like the delicate spring of a watch, which quivers for several hours after it has been touched.”

— Khushwant Singh

26. “Nature provides that a man who slaves all day should spend the hours of the night in a palace full of houris whereas a king who wields the sceptre by day should have his sleep disturbed by nightmares of rebellion and assassination.”

— Khushwant Singh

27. “In a country which had accepted caste distinctions for many centuries, inequality had become an inborn mental concept.”

— Khushwant Singh

28. “The eye hath ruined me,’ the heart complained. ‘The heart has lost me,’ the eye replied. I know not which told the truth, which lied Between, the two, it was Meer who died.”

— Khushwant Singh

29. “Not forever reigneth joy, Sets the sun on days of bliss, Friendships not forever last, They know not life, who know not this.”

— Khushwant Singh

30. “If you look at things as they are, there does not seem to be a code either of man or of God on which one can pattern one’s conduct. Wrong triumphs over right as much as right over wrong. Sometimes its triumphs are greater. What happens ultimately, you do not know. In such circumstances what can you do but cultivate an utter indifference to all values? Nothing matters. Nothing whatever...”

— Khushwant Singh

31. “She had many shortcomings, but perhaps that alone was what made her human. She may not have been a likeable person, but she was, in her own way, a woman to be loved and admired.”

— Khushwant Singh

32. “Passions have made mortals of us men. If men were not slaves of passion, they would have been Gods, each one.”

— Khushwant Singh

33. “Masjid ddhaa dey, Mandar ddhaa dey Ddhaa dey jo kuchh ddhenda. Ik kisey da dil na ddhavein Rabb dilaan vicch rehndaa.”

— Khushwant Singh

34. “There is no wine in this world as heady as applause.”

— Khushwant Singh

35. “In the absence of men all women are chaste.”

— Khushwant Singh

36. “And all the mumbo-jumbo of reincarnation. Man into ox into ape into beetle into eight million four hundred thousand kinds of animate things. Proof? We do not go in for such pedestrian pastimes as proof! That is Western. We are of the mysterious East. No proof, just faith. No reason, just faith.”

— Khushwant Singh

37. “Under the circumstances the only honest answer an intelligent person can give to the question ‘Is there a God?’ is to say, ‘I do not know.”

— Khushwant Singh

38. “Unless a miracle saves us,′ Khushwant Singh writes, ’the country will break up. It will not be Pakistan or any other foreign power that will destroy us; we will commit hara-kiri.”

— Khushwant Singh

39. “The prose-poems of the Japji envelop us by opening our third eye to the experience of concrete manifestations of nature, the overall circle of light, which shone in the nimbus, which people saw around Nanak’s face, lit up by the shimmering glow of the flame which burnt inside him. It.”

— Khushwant Singh

40. “But for many long days and nights I pondered over the words in the Mahabharata: ‘As two pieces of wood floating on the ocean come together at one time and are again separated, even such is the union of living creatures in this world.”

— Khushwant Singh

41. “I believe I did succeed in making Indian uslims look upon me as a friend: when I was nominated to be a member of the Rajya Sabha many said, “We have another Muslim in Parliament.” Others who disliked my views called me an unpaid agent of Pakistan. I treated both views as compliments.”

— Khushwant Singh

42. “Life is somewhat like a line drawing, Appearances a kind of trust, This period of grace we call age; Examine it carefully! It is a kind of waiting.”

— Khushwant Singh

43. “Champagne flowed like the Jamuna in flood.”

— Khushwant Singh