Daisaku Ikeda Quotes

People are chasing cash, not happiness. When you chase money, you're going to lose. You're just going to. Even if you get the money, you're not going to be happy.

Recognition of function always precedes recognition of being.

He who has so little knowledge of human nature as to seek happiness by changing anything but his own disposition will waste his life in fruitless efforts.

False expectations take away joy.

It is wrong to assume that men of immense wealth are always happy.

I was always too mature for my age - and not very happy. I had no young friends. I wish I could go back to those days. If I could only live it all again, how I would play and enjoy other girls. What a fool I was.

That which makes people dissatisfied with their condition, is the chimerical idea they form of the happiness of others.

Unimaginative people are spared quite a lot. They're often much happier, because they don't go through all the variety of conceptions of the person they love.

There is nothing wrong with having nice things, but when you are trying to buy nice things to be happy, you are going to hurt. It's not going to work.

To not follow your passion in life is a recipe for failure and unhappiness.

Not many people get that 'happily ever after' they want in life. There are disappointments every step of the way, no matter how hard one strives for the best.

I do not feel happy when a collection is understood too well.

A built-in reminder is the simple understanding that whenever any kind of unhappiness arises, you know you've lost the now. That's a built-in alarm clock. The moment you realize you've lost the now, come back to the now.

Of all the unhappy people in the world, the unhappiest are those who have not found something they want to do.

There is none so blind as he who will not see. We must not close our minds, we must let our thoughts be free. For every hour that passes by, we know the world gets a little bit older, it's time to realize that beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder.

The source of man's unhappiness is his ignorance of Nature.

Unless you see your nature, all this talk about cause & effect is nonsense. Buddhas don't practice nonsense.

Guys, just remember, if you get lucky, if you make a lot of money, if you get out and buy a lot of stuff--it's gonna break. You got your biggest, fanciest mansion in the world. It has air conditioning. It's got a pool. Just think of all the pumps that are going to go out. Or go to a yacht basin any place in the world. Nobody is smiling, and I'll tell you why. Something broke that morning. The generator's out; the microwave oven doesn't work . . . Things just don't mean happiness.

There's only one why. You only have one why, and your why is fully formed by the time you're 17, 18 or 19years old, maybe even earlier. The rest of your life are simply opportunities to either live in or out of balance and the career choices we make and the decisions we make in our lives either put us in balance with our why, which makes us happy, fulfilled and inspired. Or it puts us out of our why, which makes us frustrated, stressed out and sometimes we fail.

Well, if I can't be happy, I can be useful, perhaps.

And still I stood looking at the house, thinking how happy I should be if I lived there with her, and knowing that I never was happy with her, but always miserable.

Now the ears of my ears awake and now the eyes of my eyes are opened.

How could two people who were so in love not end up happily ever after? It had to work. Didn’t it?

There is no result in nature without a cause; understand the cause and you will have no need of the experiment.