If you have the chance to be exposed to a loving, understanding environment where the seed of compassion, loving kindness, can be watered every day, then you become a more loving person.

To make your voice heard is difficult. Sometimes we have to burn ourselves in order to be heard. It is out of compassion that you do that. It is the act of love and not of despair.

When you sit in a café, with a lot of music in the background and a lot of projects in your head, you're not really drinking your coffee or your tea. You're drinking your projects, you're drinking your worries. You are not real, and the coffee is not real either. Your coffee can only reveal itself to you as a reality when you go back to your self and produce your true presence, freeing yourself from the past, the future, and from your worries. When you are real, the tea also becomes real and the encounter between you and the tea is real. This is genuine tea drinking.

Peace ca n exist only in the present moment. It is rid iculous to say "Wait until I fi nish this, then I will be free to live in peace." What is "this" ? A di­ploma, a job, a house, the payment of a debt? If yo u th ink that way, peace wi ll never come. There is always another "th is" that wi ll fo llow the present one. If you are not living in peace at this moment, you will never be able to . If you truly wa nt to be at peace, you must be at peace right now. Otherwise, there is only "the hope of peace some day.

A smile can change the situation of the world.

The way must be in you; the destination also must be in you and not somewhere else in space or time. If that kind of self-transformation is being realized in you, you will arrive.

There's no way I can be tossed around like a bottle slapped here and there on the waves.