Tenzin Gyatso

Encountering sufferings will definitely contribute to the elevation of your spiritual practice, provided you are able to transform calamity and misfortune into the path.

Buddha

No matter what one does, whether one's deeds serve virtue or vice, nothing lacks importance. All actions bear fruit.

Tenzin Gyatso

Happiness is not something ready made. It comes from your own actions.

Pema Chodron

Gloriousness and wretchedness need each other. One inspires us, the other softens us.

Tenzin Gyatso

In our struggle for freedom, truth is the only weapon we possess.

Pema Chodron

A further sign of health is that we don't become undone by fear and trembling, but we take it as a message that it's time to stop struggling and look directly at what's threatening us.

Tenzin Gyatso

The creatures that inhabit this earth be they human beings or animals are here to contribute, each in its own particular way, to the beauty and prosperity of the world.

Pema Chodron

We habitually erect a barrier called blame that keeps us from communicating genuinely with others, and we fortify it with our concepts of who's right and who's wrong. We do that with the people who are closest to us and we do it with political systems, with all kinds of things that we don't like about our associates or our society. It is a very common, ancient, well-perfected device for trying to feel better. Blame others. Blaming is a way to protect your heart, trying to protect what is soft and open and tender in yourself. Rather than own that pain, we scramble to find some comfortable ground.

Tenzin Gyatso

Just as we should cultivate gentle and peaceful relations with our fellow human beings, we should also extend that same kind of attitude towards the natural environment. Morally speaking, we should be concerned for our whole environment.

Pema Chodron

People get into a heavy-duty sin and guilt trip, feeling that if things are going wrong, that means that they did something bad and they are being punished. That's not the idea at all. The idea of karma is that you continually get the teachings that you need to open your heart. To the degree that you didn't understand in the past how to stop protecting your soft spot, how to stop armoring your heart, you're given this gift of teachings in the form of your life, to give you everything you need to open further.

Noble measure but very dangerous. If China gets a hold of him they may never let him go.

Tenzin Gyatso

Whether we are rich or poor, educated or uneducated, whatever our nationality, color, social status, or ideology may be, the purpose of our lives is to be happy.

Pema Chodron

When you begin to touch your heart or let your heart be touched, you begin to discover that it's bottomless, that it doesn't have any resolution, that this heart is huge, vast, and limitless. You begin to discover how much warmth and gentleness is there, as well as how much space.

Tenzin Gyatso

Every man has the basis of good. Not only human beings, you can find it among animals and insects, for instance, when we treat a dog or horse lovingly.

Pema Chodron

Compassionate action starts with seeing yourself when you start to make yourself right and when you start to make yourself wrong. At that point you could just contemplate the fact that there is a larger alternative to either of those, a more tender, shaky kind of place where you could live.

Buddha

You yourself, as much as anyone in the entire universe, deserve your love and affections.

Pema Chodron

There's a reason you can learn from everything: you have basic wisdom, basic intelligence, and basic goodness.

It doesn't require guardian angels or Gods plan, karma, or anything.

Life is motion, chaos, chance and luck.

Pema Chodron

If we learn to open our hearts,
anyone, including the people who drive us crazy,
can be our teacher.

James M. Barrie

Those who bring sunshine into the lives of others cannot keep it from themselves.

Pema Chodron

When we start out on a spiritual path we often have ideals we think we're supposed to live up to. We feel we're supposed to be better than we are in some way. But with this practice you take yourself completely as you are. Then ironically, taking in pain - breathing it in for yourself and all others in the same boat as you are - heightens your awareness of exactly where you're stuck.

Senecca

The Fates lead those who will; those who won't, they drag.

Pema Chodron

We work on ourselves in order to help others, but also we help others in order to work on ourselves.

Buddha

One who acts on truth is happy, in this world and beyond.

Pema Chodron

The truth you believe and cling to makes you unavailable to hear anything new.

Thich Nhat Hanh

"In order to rally people, governments need enemies. They want us to be afraid, to hate, so we will rally behind them. And if they do not have a real enemy, they will invent one in order to mobilize us."

This is the way of peace

"Overcome evil with good, falsehood with truth, and hatred with love." - Peace Pilgrim

Thich Nhat Hanh

"If our love is only a will to possess, it is not love."

John Lilly

In the province of the mind, what one believes to be true, either is true, or becomes true.

Thich Nhat Hanh

"Life can be found only in the present moment. The past is gone, the future is not yet here, and if we do not go back to ourselves in the present moment, we cannot be in touch with life."

Old Inuit Saying

I think over again my small adventures.

My fears, those small ones that seemed so big.

For all the vital things I had to get and to reach.

And yet there is only one great thing.

The only thing.

To live to see the great day that dawns and the light that fills the world.

Thich Nhat Hanh

"People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don't even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child -- our own two eyes. All is a miracle."