Dalai Lama Quotes

Reality is observer-determined - it's a spatio-temporal process, which fortunately means that things must change.

All phenomena are empty.

A flower is not a flower. It is made only of non-flower elements - sunshine, clouds, time, space, earth, minerals, gardeners, and so on. A true flower contains the whole universe. If we return any one of these non-flower elements to its source, there will be no flower.

All progression is in the relative world.

Everything is relative in this world, where change alone endures.

One cannot conceive of objectivity without subjectivity.

Perception is a prism, and reality is like shot silk - depends where the light hits.

There is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself.

You too must not count too much on your reality as you feel it today, since like yesterday, it may prove an illusion for you tomorrow.

A weed is no more than a flower in disguise, Which is seen through at once, if love give a man eyes.

A course never quite looks the same way twice. The combinations of weather, season, light, feelings and thoughts that you find there are ever-changing.

The observer, when he seems to himself to be observing a stone, is really, if physics is to be believed, observing the effects of the stone upon himself.

There is no absolute point of view from which real and ideal can be finally separated and labelled.

The world is given to me only once, not one existing and one perceived. Subject and object are only one. The barrier between them cannot be said to have broken down as a result of recent experience in the physical sciences, for this barrier does not exist.

No object is so beautiful that, under certain conditions, it will not look ugly.

It is only in appearance that time is a river. It is rather a vast landscape and it is the eye of the beholder that moves.

From a distance it is something; and nearby it is nothing.

The knowable world is incomplete if seen from any one point of view, incoherent if seen from all points of view at once, and empty if seen from nowhere in particular.

Beauty, my dear Sir, is not so much a quality of the object beheld, as an effect in him who beholds it. If our sight were longer or shorter, or if our constitution were different, what now appears beautiful to us would seem misshapen, and what we now think misshapen we should regard as beautiful. The most beautiful hand seen through the microscope will appear horrible. Some things are beautiful at a distance, but ugly near;

There is no essence, but there is a flux that is more real than any instance of the flux, such as a milk bottle or a tiger.

I want a nonfiction that explores our shifting, unstable, multiform, evanescent experience in and of the world.

Beauty is only about relationships. Nothing is beautiful on its own.

If faces were different when lit from above or below -- what was a face? What was anything?

You cannot see what I see because you see what you see. You cannot know what I know because you know what you know. What I see and what I know cannot be added to what you see and what you know because they are not of the same kind. Neither can it replace what you see and what you know, because that would be to replace you yourself." "Hang on, can I write this down?" said Arthur, excitedly fumbling in his pocket for a pencil.

The Now is as it is because it cannot be otherwise. What Buddhists have always known, physicists now confirm: there are no isolated things or events. Underneath the surface appearance, all things are interconnected, are part of the totality of the cosmos that has brought about the form that this moment takes.