There is nothing more difficult than waking someone who is only pretending to be asleep.

We were made to enjoy music, to enjoy beautiful sunsets, to enjoy looking at the billows of the sea and to be thrilled with a rose that is bedecked with dew… Human beings are actually created for the transcendent, for the sublime, for the beautiful, for the truthful... and all of us are given the task of trying to make this world a little more hospitable to these beautiful things.

One of the things that people sense is that you are not doing this for self-glorification, you are doing it for the sake of others. The Dalai Lama has been in exile for so many years, yet the Chinese are running scared of him.

To forgive is to abandon your right to pay back the predator in his own coin, but it is the loss that Liberates.

The devastation wreaked by landmines is not only horrendous but immoral

Without forgiveness, there is no future. Forgiveness is not nebulous, impractical and idealistic. It's thoroughly realistic. It's real political in the long run.

You ask when is it that you can say yes we have had enough. It is enough revenge and I think now we have restored the equilibrium. It never happens!