Dalai Lama Quotes

Be patient and tough; someday this pain will be useful to you.

To be emotionally resilient and to overcome your circumstances, not through fighting, but through being courageous and having endurance was something I thought was of primary importance.

Too much hard luck can create a permanent meanness of spirit in any creature.

When you see how you react when you suffer that's when you know what you are made of.

Being knee-deep in sadness or suffering and refusing to look down - to me, that represents something more powerful than someone who's never gone through difficulty.

In a cruel land, you either learned to laugh at cruelty or spent your life weeping.

You can't avoid pain, but you can choose to overcome it.

I think I was as mentally tough as I've ever been. I felt like I handled the situation both on and off the court extremely well. I felt like I needed to.

There is a certain kind of maturity that can be attained only through the discipline of suffering.

Confronting and overcoming challenges is an exhilarating experience. It does something to feed the soul and the mind. It makes you more than you were before. It strengthens the mental muscles and enables you to become better prepared for the next challenge.

People need trouble - a little frustration to sharpen the spirit on, toughen it. Artists do; I don't mean you need to live in a rat hole or gutter, but you have to learn fortitude, endurance. Only vegetables are happy.

Good soldiers are defined by what they can endure, not by what they can inflict.

There is nothing in the world so much admired as a man who knows how to bear unhappiness with courage.

It takes a lot of energy and creativity to make such screwed up lives carry on. And the kind of will people have to survive, year after year, dealing with that stuff, is weirdly impressive.

Extraordinary people survive under the most terrible circumstances and they become more extraordinary because of it.

Three hundred years ago a prisoner condemned to the Tower of London carved on the wall of his cell this sentiment to keep up his spirits during his long imprisonment: 'It is not adversity that kills, but the impatience with which we bear adversity.

Human beings have enormous resilience.

I am a sweet old softy, but it took toughness to get through what I went through.

People ask, how do you cope, and all I can say is that you do.

Strength doesn't mean an absence of pain.

You're going to have highs and lows, but it's how you get through the lows.

The stuff I've seen and lived and survived. Gun to my head, cops coming to your house. I had the confidence of telling myself that I'm going to make it. Everything I've been through, I could've had a mental breakdown, but I kept it together. If I didn't have that confidence I wouldn't have made it. That confidence has nothing to do with basketball.

It is not so much the greatness of our troubles, as the littleness of our spirit, which makes us complain.

There are those who suffer and grow strong; there are those who suffer and grow weak. This mystery of pain is still for me the saddest of earth's disabilities.

If things sometimes get tough, you can't ask yourself what impact it's having on you. It isn't an option.