When hearing a door creak, the optimist thinks it's opening and the pessimist thinks it's closing.

We deal with our mind from morning until evening. This mind can be our best friend or our worst enemy. We should do everything we can to improve outer circumstances - remedying poverty, inequalities, conflicts, and so on - while also doing our best to achieve a state of mind that give us the inner resources to deal with the ups and downs of life.

Envy and jealousy stem from the fundamental inability to rejoice at someone else's happiness or success

What counts is not the enormity of the task, but the size of the courage.

If contemplation of other people's pain just increases distress, then I think we should see it in another way. If we don't center too much on ourselves, then [we] increase our courage and our determination to remedy the pain, not our distress. If we have unconditional compassion, then it increases our courage. So that's the difference, self-centered motivation versus altruistic motivation.

Empathy is the faculty to resonate with the feelings of others. When we meet someone who is joyful, we smile. When we witness someone in pain, we suffer in resonance with his or her suffering.

You should really stop worrying, develop the real wish to live and with a good motivation, [such as] "I have a better life and I can put that life at the benefit of others."