Dalai Lama Quotes

I have learned more about love, selflessness and human understanding from the people I have met in this great adventure in the world of AIDS than I ever did in the cutthroat, competitive world in which I spent my life.

The loving parts of your personality have no trouble loving. That is all they do. You experience the loving parts of as gratitude, appreciation, caring, patience, contentment and awe of life.

Skip the religion and politics, head straight to the compassion. Everything else is a distraction.

Love of our neighbour, then, has just the same respect to, is no more distant from, self-love, than hatred of our neighbour, or than love or hatred of anything else.

I think that the greatest lesson I learned from my father is just having compassion towards people.

I think I am a very kind person. I think I'm joyful, but I could be kinder and I could be more joyful. I do believe peace is a state of grace, and not the absence of violence.

Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.

What we can do for another is the test of powers; what we can suffer is the test of love.

We are in this world to learn and embody compassion and love.

When Christ's love fills our hearts, it puts selfishness on the run.

There is no denying that consideration of others is worthwhile and that our happiness is inextricably bound up with the happiness of others. There is no denying that if society suffers, we ourselves suffer, and the more our hearts and minds are afflicted with ill-will, the more miserable we become. We can reject religion, ideology, received wisdom, but we cannot escape the need for love and compassion.

Love is doing something you don't want to do for someone you don't particularly like at that moment.

Learning to love unselfishly is not an easy task. It runs counter to our self-centered nature.

Masters are those who have chosen only love. In every instance. In every moment. In every circumstance. Even as they were being killed, they loved their murderers. Even as they were being persecuted, they loved their oppressors.

Don't be a jerk. Try to love everyone. Give more than you take. And do it despite the fact that you only really like about seven out of 500 people.

There are only two roads that lead to something like human happiness. They are marked by the words . . . love and achievement. . . . Inorder to be happy oneself it is necessary to make at least one other person happy. . . . The secret of human happiness is not inself-seeking but in self-forgetting.

In our concern for others, we worry less about ourselves. When we worry less about ourselves an experience of our own suffering is less intense. What does this tell us? Firstly, because our every action has a universal dimension, a potential impact on others' happiness, ethics are necessary as a means to ensure that we do not harm others. Secondly, it tells us that genuine happiness consists in those spiritual qualities of love, compassion, patience, tolerance and forgiveness and so on. For it is these which provide both for our happiness and others' happiness.

Certain beliefs must accompany every action: One should act without selfishness, cultivate compassion for all living things, and develop respect for others.

It is impossible to be both selfish and happy.

If indeed the qualities such as love, patience, tolerance, and forgiveness are what happiness consists in, and if it is also true that compassion, defined as concern for others, is both the source and the fruit of these qualities, then the more we are compassionate, the more we provide for our own happiness.

True happiness comes from having a sense of inner peace and contentment, which in turn must be achieved by cultivating altruism, love and compassion, and by eliminating anger, selfishness and greed.

The simple recognition that everyone else wants to be happy and not to suffer, just as I do, serves as a constant reminder against selfishness and partiality. It reminds us there is little to be gained from being kind and generous while hoping to win something in return. Actions motivated by a desire to earn a good name for ourselves are still selfish, even if they appear to be acts of kindness.

But if I decide to decide there’s a different, less selfish, less lonely point to my life, won’t the reason for this decision be my desire to be less lonely, meaning to suffer less overall pain? Can the decision to be less selfish ever be anything other than a selfish decision?

One thing is clear to me, that no indulgence of passion destroys the spiritual nature so much as respectable selfishness.