If others are happy, we will be happy. If others suffer, ultimately we all suffer.

If you resort to violent methods because the other side has destroyed your monastery, for example, you then have lost not only your monastery, but also your special Buddhist practices of detachment, love, and compassion.

Some consider me as a living Buddha. That's nonsense. That's silly. That's wrong. If they consider me a simple Buddhist monk, however, that's probably okay.

If we can refrain from harming others in our actions & words, we can start to give serious attention to actively doing good.

More fundamental than religion is our basic human spirituality. We have a basic human disposition towards love, kindness and affection, irrespective of whether we have a religious framework or not. When we nurture this most basic human resource - when we set about cultivating those basic inner values which we all appreciate in others, then we start to live spiritually.

True compassion is not just an emotional response but a firm commitment founded on reason.

There is often a big disparity between the way in which we perceive things and the way things really are.