The average American teenager sends or receives 75 text messages a day, though one girl in Sacramento managed to handle an average of 10,000 every 24 hours for a month.

Often when we think of exile we think of destruction or loss. But the Dalai Lama always says exile is reality, it's something we can make use of, and he has used it to get rid of everything that he thought was stifling and old, and to create a new, improved and much healthier Tibet.

And if travel is like love, it is, in the end, mostly because it's a heightened state of awareness, in which we are mindful, receptive, undimmed by familiarity and ready to be transformed. That is why the best trips, like the best love affairs, never really end.

Death undoes us less, sometimes, than the hope that it will never come.

Dalai Lama was leading his country during the rigors of World War II, he was in Beijing for a year in 1954; he was up against Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai from the time that he was fifteen. So he's no newcomer or naive when it comes to politics.

Its no coincidence that the word holiday suggests a holy day, or that the longest book in the Torah concerns the Sabbath. If you wish to advance in any sphere, the best way is to take a retreat.

More than any religious figure that I can think of, Dalai Lama goes out of his way to attend interfaith conferences; religious harmony is one of his urgent priorities in life.