It is natural for us, as human beings, to look forward. Our eyes naturally look ahead. In this sense, we are made for moving toward a goal.

Anyone who has ever made a resolution discovers that the strength of that determination fades in time. The moment you feel that is when you should make a fresh determination. Tell yourself, “OK! I will start again from now!” If you fall down seven times, get up an eighth. Don’t give up when you feel discouraged-jus t pick yourself up and renew your determination each time.

Hope is the sun. It is light. It is passion. It is the fundamental force for life's blossoming.

Divorced from the cosmos, from nature, from society and from each other, we have become fractured and fragmented.

Hope changes everything. It changes winter into summer, darkness into dawn, descent into ascent, barrenness into creativity, agony into joy.

I have for some time urged that a nuclear abolition summit to mark the effective end of the nuclear era be convened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the 70th anniversary of the bombings of those cities, with the participation of national leaders and representatives of global civil society.

History is filled with tragic examples of wars that result from diplomatic impasse. Whether in our local communities or in international relations, the skillful use of our communicative capacities to negotiate and resolve differences is the first evidence of human wisdom.