If you see the humanity in the world, grains of sand that bring everything to a halt - corruption, clashes of egos, human factors more than resources. So, how to avoid that? There’s a lack of human maturity. So it’s not been a fertile exercise to perfect yourself to some extent before you serve others, otherwise it’s like cutting the wheat when it’s still green. And nobody is fed by that. So we need a minimum of readiness to efficiently and wisely be at the service of others. So compassion needs also to be sort of enlightened by wisdom. Otherwise, it’s blind.

It's not the magnitude of the task that matters, it's the magnitude of our courage.

Children, old people, vagabonds laugh easily and heartily: they have nothing to lose and hope for little. In renunciation lies a delicious taste of simplicity and deep peace.

You get [something] in your body that is the suffering or the problem, and then you [add] a second one, which is worry. In both cases, [it is] pointless.

If there is a remedy or a cure, a solution to a problem or difficulty, why worry?

When you engage in compassion, and you hear a distressing sound, like someone calling for help, there is an activation in an area of the brain called the insular, which has to do with empathy and altruism, that is vastly more activated than in non-meditators.

Whatever you train, you change your brain.