At each point in our lives, we are at a crossroads. We are the fruit of our past and we are the architects of our future... If you want to know your past, look at your present circumstances. If you want to know your future, look at what is in your mind.

When you see a Tibetan doctor taking care of a patient, first of all, of course there are many wonderful medicines that come from [there in the past] 2,000 years. But this doctor is usually so attentional, so kind, and so careful of what you really feel and then [he sees] you as a human being instead of running you through some quick tests. So that itself, the trust and confidence in someone that cares for you is of course so invigorating... that someone cares.

When faced with adverse circumstances, if you can do something, do it and there is not need to worry. If you can't do anything, then there is no point to worry. So in either case, worrying is an added suffering. But this does not mean of course that we should not be unhappy about injustice, abuse and other kinds of behavior that brings suffering upon others.

To grant forgiveness to someone who has truly changed is not a way of condoning or forgetting his or her past crimes, but of acknowledging whom he or she has become.

You're not insensitive or indifferent, but you're also not vulnerable to the upheavals that cause emotional stress because you can buffer that... So that's the result of meditation; you could call that emotional balance.

We all have the ability to study the causes of suffering and gradually to free ourselves from them....it is not the magnitude of the task that matters, it's the magnitude of our courage.

There is definitely openness to others' suffering that is dealt not with distress but with compassion.