...home lies in the things you carry with you everywhere and not the ones that tie you down.

Unlike many spiritual leaders, Dalai Lama is never been in a position to just sit on a mountain top handing out wisdom. He's had to live out his principles in the middle of this very complex situation, every day for sixty years or more. I think it's something that moves many people about his example.

I think that foreignness is always with you. Indeed, I find California more foreign to me the longer I live here. In thirty years of living here on and off, it hasn't lost anything of foreignness. If anything, it has gained.

I think of the Dalai Lama as a doctor of the mind offering medicine and specific counsel and cures in the way a great doctor would.

In an age of acceleration, nothing can be more exhilarating than going slow.

That's the great advantage of being a foreigner: you're not paying your dues, but you are getting all the benefits.

In our appetite for gossip, we tend to gobble down everything before us, only to find, too late, that it is our ideals we have consumed, and we have not been enlarged by the feasts but only diminished.