It is our enemies who provide us with the challenge we need to develop the qualities of tolerance, patience and compassion.

We can wake ourselves up, discover in ourselves an energy that was hidden there, and act with more clarity, more force.

What acts as a far more effective circumstance for generating compassion and what, in fact, rouses us from our comfortable meditation seat is actually seeing or hearing others - encountering others directly, not just conceptually in our imagination.

Forgiveness doesn't mean forget what happened. If something is serious and it is necessary to take counter-measures, you have to take counter-measures.

Those who don't have a life filled with luxury may have a home filled with compassion, based on their choice to be content and to practice self-discipline. Even when we have physical hardships, we can be very happy.

In today's highly interdependent world, individuals and nations can no longer resolve many of their problems by themselves. We need one another. It is our collective and individual responsibility to protect and nurture the global family, to support its weaker members, and to preserve and tend to the environment in which we all live.

From that viewpoint, America, free country, democratic country, so more opportunity. Still is more sort of Alive. This is my feeling.