Of course it looks very selfish. Only sad people look unselfish. Happy people always look selfish, and happy people are always condemned because the whole society is unhappy. “How do you dare you be happy? When everybody is so unhappy, you must be very selfish to be happy. Don’t smile when everybody is weeping and crying, and don’t laugh. Life is very miserable, and it looks unmannerly.”

A man like Zorba will never be accepted in any home. You would not allow him to stay with you because his very presence would be a disturbance. He does not believe in any morality. He knows only one morality: of happiness.

And I say to you, that is the only morality there is. All else is rubbish – because only a happy person can be moral, only a happy person is not interested in making others unhappy, only a happy person creates an atmosphere around him where others can also be happy. But those others will not like the idea of your being happy when they are miserable.

You may have loved Zorba, but you won’t allow Zorba to become a guest in your home. He is unreliable. Such happy people are dangerous. You can rely on sad, dead people: they will not escape with your wife! Zorba can. He lives in the moment. He has no future, no past; no heaven, no hell. He is very true to the real moment.

But you may have loved him. This happens. This has to be understood. You always love the opposite. The opposite attracts you – but only in fantasy. In reality it will be troublesome. People who have never loved go on reading poetry about love. Sometimes, they even try to write poetry about love. This has been my observation: I have come across many poets and they have missed love in life, so they go on writing poetry about it. That’s a substitute: very pale, useless, but still a little satisfying. At least something is here. Plastic flowers…but they look like flowers. Love is dangerous. To write poetry about love has no danger in it.

Watch: if somebody is reciting a poem on love you may welcome him, but if the man really moves into love then the society will condemn him. Read the story of Laila and Majnu, or Shiri and Farhad, and you will love it. But the people who were alive in the days of Majnu hated the man, because who loves a lover? Try to be a lover and you will be condemned by the society. Write poetry about it and maybe the president will give you an award; you may get the Nobel Prize. No lover ever gets a Nobel Prize. People who write poetry about love get Nobel Prizes.

Man has become afraid of the real, but about the phony…there is no danger in it. Have you watched this? Sometimes you are sitting in your room or in your house and reading or doing something, and somebody knocks at the door. You feel very bad. Now somebody has come to disturb you. You don’t even like to answer; you would like to avoid it. You don’t go yourself: you send the servant to the door, or your child, to tell the person that “Daddy is not at home.” But if somebody gives you a call on the phone, then you are not disturbed. Then you immediately take the phone in your hand, because the reality is so far away.