Dalai Lama Quotes

If you can cultivate the right attitude, your enemies are your best spiritual teachers because their presence provides you with the opportunity to enhance and develop tolerance, patience and understanding.

If you are irritated by every rub, how will your mirror be polished?

Hard times build determination and inner strength. Through them we can also come to appreciate the uselessness of anger. Instead of getting angry nurture a deep caring and respect for troublemakers because by creating such trying circumstances they provide us with invaluable opportunities to practice tolerance and patience.

We cannot learn real patience and tolerance from a guru or a friend. They can be practiced only when we come in contact with someone who creates unpleasant experiences. According to Shantideva, enemies are really good for us as we can learn a lot from them and build our inner strength.

By facing our challenges and overcoming them, we grow stronger, wiser, and more compassionate.

From adversity we can learn the value of patience.

The ability to find solutions to life's challenges is what makes us grow as a person.

Obstacles are found everywhere, and in overcoming them we nourish ourselves.

No pain that we suffer, no trial that we experience is wasted. All that we suffer and all that we endure, especially when we endure it patiently, builds up our characters, purifies our hearts, expands our souls, and makes us more tender and charitable.

An easy life doesn't teach us anything. In the end it's the learning that matters: what we've learned and how we've grown

There's much that goes to the makin' of a man or woman into somethin' better than a brute beast, but there's three things in chief, an' they're the places where life sets us down, an' the folks life knocks us up against, an' -- not the things ye get, but the things ye don't get.

I'm a big believer in growth. Life is not about achievement, it's about learning and growth, and developing qualities like compassion, patience, perseverance, love, and joy, and so forth. And so if that is the case, then I think our goals should include something which stretches us.

Character is constructed amidst the tempests of the World

Life is meant to be a challenge, because challenges are what make you grow.

Everyone has challenges and lessons to learn - we wouldn't be who we are without them.

You only mature when you face problems you can't deal with.

Difficulties are things that show a person what they are.

Challenges make you discover things about yourself that you never really knew.

Not being beautiful was the true blessing. Not being beautiful forced me to develop my inner resources. The pretty girl has a handicap to overcome.

A man of character finds a special attractiveness in difficulty, since it is only by coming to grips with difficulty that he can realize his potentialities

The one thing I have discovered is that we all have challenges; the challenges vary, but our response to the challenges makes us people we are.

All the losses that I had, I think they were important, just because it helped me grow as a fighter, helped me grow as a person.

Every failure, every adversity, every heartache may be a blessing in disguise providing it softens the animal portion of our nature.

The challenges we face in life are always lessons that serve our soul's growth.

We develop our character muscles by overcoming challenges and obstacles.