Life is as dear to a mute creature as it is to man. Just as one wants happiness and fears pain, just as one wants to live and not die, so do other creatures.

The key to genuine happiness is in our hands. To think this way is to discover the essential values of kindness, brotherly love and altruism. The more clearly we see the benefits of these values, the more we will seek to reject anything that opposes them; in this way we will be able to bring about inner transformation.

There is...a tendency to think of the spiritual life as primarily introspective, divorced from the concerns of everyday life....Faith that does not translate into actions is no faith at all.

Anything that contradicts experience and logic should be abandoned.

Compassion is the wish for another being to be free from suffering; love is wanting them to have happiness.

I think there's every reason this 21st century will be much happier.

If we choose an external marker as the measure of our inner worth, whether it is the amount of money we make, or others' opinion of us, or the success of some project we're involved in, sooner or later we're bound to be battered by life's inevitable changes. After all, money comes and goes, and thus is an unstable source of self-esteem, an unreliable foundation upon which to build our identity.