If you want to be miserable, think of yourself. If you want to be happy, think of others.

A book very much is the center of the road, so people always can refer back to it.

One of the characteristics of every great teacher I've known is tremendous exertion. It's interesting: You may see them as spiritual people or compassionate people, but the driving force is that incredible exertion - and their ability to sustain it.

A lot of people dabbling means Buddhism has come into the mainstream, where people begin to use these terms and ideas, and they become less foreign.

The self-assured strength that grows from knowing that we already have what we need makes us gentle, because we are no longer desperate.

If you decide to go on a Buddhist path, you have to be careful if you start mixing a lot of different traditions you are not totally familiar with - mixing this kind of meditation with that kind of practice or this kind of visualization with that kind of mantra. Then you really are concocting your own thing, and you have no idea what is going to happen.

When I ask people to contemplate selflessness, the sometimes react as if I've asked them to put their house on the market or give away all their money. If there was a self that existed in the way we think, discovering selflessness would be like putting our house on the market. But in the Buddhist tradition, the discovery of selflessness is called "completely joyful." It's not called "the raw end of the deal," or "I'd rather go back to bed," or "This is scary and depressing."