Dalai Lama Quotes

The fact that I am a writer comes from the experience of being cut away from my roots and living in Venezuela, where I couldn't find a place for myself, for years and years.

My family settled in Cairo in 1980. I was nine. I missed Libya terribly, but I also took to Cairo. I perfected the accent. People assumed I was Egyptian.

Sometimes you have to disclaim your country and inhabit another before you can return to your own.

Any time I found a new piece of knowledge or wisdom, I would thank Allah for it. Then Allah would bless me with more of it.

A cultural thing that is funny to me is that every time I go out in D.C. after a show, all the nightclubs and restaurants are owned by Iranians and Afghans. It's funny to me how we lost our countries but we gained the nightlife.

I am just so grateful for every single day, and if I could just not think past today, I would be living the life that I think God meant me to live.

Whatever your religion, you have to find internal happiness, which I found.

There's a blessing in everything that happens to us.

And so I remember moving to LA, going to the Islamic center in Hollywood and feeling like the cultural element wasn't what we were operating from as much as the spiritual one, and that was really cool. That was really good for, you know, my growth and my development.

I've gotten used to being a foreigner.

I'm an immigrant, and I think being an outsider in your home is something that I really relate to.

All the materialistic things I have been able to have over the last number of years are slowly being taken away from me. It's been really challenging but also it's been encouraging to myself to see what my God is actually doing.

I feel that where I came from made me the actor that I am, and I wouldn't want to trade that with anything else.

I knew that I would have to leave Venezuela in order to figure out who I was.

I use what God had given me. I don't wish for anything else. I don't wish I can be a high-flier.

I'm thankful God really slowed me down and showed me, whatever he had gave to me, he can take it away.

I never considered myself as somebody in exile because, different to my father who, yes, was in exile because he left Haiti as an adult, for me it was just to be somewhere else. I carried Haiti with me everywhere, but I also carried, you know, my youth in a public school in Brooklyn. It's part of who I am as well.

My brothers and sisters, do we remember to give thanks for the blessings we receive? Sincerely giving thanks not only helps us recognize our blessings, but it also unlocks the doors of heaven and helps us feel God's love.

We must meditate on what God has done in our life instead of what we are still waiting on Him to do.

We can say that true gratitude does not give rise to the debtor's ethic because it gives rise to faith in future grace. With true gratitude there is such a delight in the worth of God's past grace, that we are driven on to experience more and more of it in the future...it is done by transforming gratitude into faith as it turns from contemplating the pleasures of past grace and starts contemplating the promises of the future.

Do not exclusively say your prayers in the form of asking God for something. The prayer of thanksgiving is much more powerful.

Thanksgiving-giving thanks in everything-prepares the way that God might show us His fullest salvation in Christ.

When you are grateful, that allows God to do great things in your life.

I have been trying to get the hang of not being proud but instead turning that into thankfulness. Really whatever we have to be proud about, it is something given to us by the Lord.

When we feel that old spirit of complaining start to bubble up in our hearts, we need to remind ourselves to take time to thank God for His blessings.