Ultimately, happiness comes down to choosing between the discomfort of becoming aware of your mental afflictions and the discomfort of being ruled by them.

Any attempt to capture the direct experience of the nature of mind in words is impossible. The best that can be said is that it is immeasurably peaceful and, once stabilized through repeated experience, virtually unshakable. It's an experience of absolute well-being that radiates through all physical, emotional and mental states-even those that might ordinarily be labeled as unpleasant.

When you see your own desire to be happy, you can't avoid seeing the same desire in others.

So overall, though my life is far from perfect, I'm contented with it. And in a peculiar way, I'm grateful for the troubling emotions I experienced. The obstacles we face in life can provide powerful incentives for change.

The opportunity to experience yourself differently is always available.

Happiness and unhappiness are not primarily created by the material world or the physical body. First and foremost, they are decisions of the mind.

It’s so easy to think that we’re the only ones who suffer, while other people are somehow immune to pain, as though they’d been born with some kind of special knowledge about being happy, that, through some cosmic accident, we never received. Thinking in this way, we make our own problems seem much bigger than they really are.