A compassionate attitude helps you communicate more easily with your fellow human beings. As a result, you make more genuine friends and the atmosphere around you is more positive, which gives you greater inner strength. This inner strength helps you spontaneously concern yourself with others, instead of thinking only about yourself.

I pray for all of us, oppressor and friend, that together we succeed in building a better world through human understanding and love, and that in doing so we may reduce the pain and suffering of all sentient beings.

Whenever I visit a market and see the chickens crowded together in tiny cages that give them no room to move around and spread their wings and the fish slowly drowning in the air, my heart goes out to them. People have to learn to think about animals in a different way, as sentient beings who love life and fear death. I urge everyone who can to adopt a compassionate vegetarian diet.

It is worthwhile for one to make an effort to achieve happiness. Just as the purpose of a plant is to grow, so it is that the main purpose of every human being is to survive and to grow until death.

To conquer oneself is a greater victory than to conquer thousands in a battle.

Your education tends to develop the brain while it neglects the heart, so you have a longing for teachings that develop and strengthen the good heart.

Because the twentieth century was a century of violence, let us make the twenty-first a century of dialogue.