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

No change occurs if we just let our habitual tendencies and automatic patterns of thought perpetuate and even reinforce themselves, thought after thought, day after day, year after year. But those tendencies and patterns can be challenged.

[Some of the people I'd met] were wonderful people as human beings, and some people were more difficult. I could not see a correlation between their particular genius in playing chess and music and mathematics, etc. ... with human qualities. Some were really good, wonderful people, and some were difficult characters, but there was no clear correlation. But when I met some spiritual masters, [I thought that] there had to be a correlation, and it turned out to be true.

The Dalai Lama has been extremely interested in science since his childhood.

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'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.

To love oneself is to love life. It is essential to understand that we make ourselves happy in making others happy.