Dalai Lama Quotes

Do Not Waste Your Life Lightly

Our life is our life. If we waste it, we're fools.

You have to keep time aside for life, which I haven't done enough over the past couple years.

I would shoot for long periods in Chennai, and now I wish I spent more time with my family. That is what matters the most.

Once people start to think they've wasted parts of their life, or they're wasting their life as they speak, that means there's going to be great dramatic and comedic tension.

Many people don't know about the power of good feelings, and so their feelings are reactions or responses to what happens to them. They have put their feelings on automatic pilot, instead of deliberately taking charge of them.

A feeling of aversion or attachment toward something is your clue that there's work to be done.

Don't look back, never look back. How often do people tell themselves that after an experience that is exceptionally good (or exceptionally bad?)? Often, I suppose. And the advice usually goes unheeded. Humans were built to look back; that's why we have tat swivel joint in our necks.

The surest way to make ourselves crazy is to get involved in other people's business, and the quickest way to become sane and happy is to tend to our own affairs.

To fill the hour; that is happiness to fill the hour, and leave no crevice for a repentance or an approval.

I’d like to be remembered as one who kept my priorities in the right order. We live in a changing world, but we need to be reminded that the important things have not changed, and the important things will not change if we keep our priorities in proper order.

Seventy-five years. That's how much time you get if you're lucky. Seventy-five years. Seventy-five winters, seventy-five springtimes, seventy-five summers, and seventy-five autumns. When you look at it like that, it's not a lot of time, is it? Don't waste them. Get your head out of the rat race and forget about the superficial things that pre-occupy your existence and get back to what's important now.

Life is too short, or too long, for me to allow myself the luxury of living it so badly.

Whatever happens around you, don't take it personally... Nothing other people do is because of you. It is because of themselves.

I feel kind of depressed today... Do you ever have the feeling that life has passed you by? Worse than that... Sometimes I think life and I are going in opposite directions!

Life is already too short to waste on speed.

Why do people spend their time being sad when they could be happy?

Men regret their life has been ill-spent, but this does not always induce them to make a better use of the time they have yet to live.

Time And well being are two valuable belongings that we do not acknowledge and respect till they've been depleted.

Consider pleasures as they depart, not as they come.

If you could say, with truth, to your own solitary heart, to-night, 'I have secured to myself the love and attachment, the gratitude or respect, of no human creature; I have won myself a tender place in no regard; I have done nothing good or serviceable to be remembered by!' your seventy-eight years would be seventy-eight heavy curses; would they not?

Two hours. One hundred and twenty minutes. Anything might be done in that time. Anything. Nothing. Oh, he had had hundreds of hours, and what had he done with them? Wasted them, spilt the precious minutes as though his reservoir were inexhaustible.

You create a good future by creating a good present. How do you do that? By recognizing the goodness that is already inherent in the present moment, even in the midst of challenges. Discontent, blaming, complaining, self-pity cannot serve as a foundation for a good future, no matter how much effort you make.

People involve themselves in countless activities which they consider to be important, but they forget about one activity which is more important and necessary than any other, and which includes all other things: the improvement of their soul

The thing about 50 is that you've clearly reached a point where you have more of your life behind you than ahead of you, and that's a very different place to be in. You're thinking, 'I've done most of it.' I don't like that feeling. But it makes you evaluate your life and go, 'Am I doing what I want to do? Am I spending my time the way I want?'