Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Many people would say that A Tibetan monk, even in Lhasa, may be free while the ruler of China may not be free.
I've never meditated in my life. I don't practice yoga nor any religion. I'm a tourist on the realm of stillness.
Almost everybody I know has this sense of overdosing on information and getting dizzy living at post-human speeds.
As soon as I'm on the road, I see, often palpably, that I know nothing at all, which is always a great liberation.
It so often happens that somebody says 'change your life' and you repaint your car rather than re-wire the engine.
Like teenagers, we appear to have gone from knowing nothing about the world to knowing too much all but overnight.
So travel for me is an act of discovery and of responsibility as well a grand adventure and a constant liberation.
All good trips are, like love, about being carried out of yourself and deposited in the midst of terror and wonder.
That's the great advantage of being a foreigner: you're not paying your dues, but you are getting all the benefits.
Travel, for me, is a little bit like being in love, because suddenly all your senses are at the setting marked “on.
The one thing perhaps that technology hasn't always given us is a sense of how to make the wisest use of technology.
We travel, in essence, to become young fools again - to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.
There's so much visible stuff around now, we're tempted to forget that it's usually the invisible that matters most.
You rebel against your parents until you become them. One day you look in the mirror and you see your father's face.
Any school would gain, if the students began the day with meditation, cleared their heads and got themselves centered.
Not having a car gives me volumes not to think or worry about, and makes walks around the neighborhood a daily adventure.
Dalai Lama is taking a subtle and nuanced view of politics and he is thinking in terms of events well beyond our lifetime.
Every day there are small moments when we have a choice: will we take in more stuff, or just clear our minds out for a bit?
One curiosity of being a foreigner everywhere is that one finds oneself discerning Edens where the locals see only Purgatory.
But it’s only by having some distance from the world that you can see it whole, and understand what you should be doing with it.
I think Dalai Lama is always careful about stressing that people be led into the practice by somebody who knows what's going on.
I would never call Jerusalem beautiful or comfortable or consoling. But there's something about it that you can't turn away from.
A traveler is really not someone who crosses ground so much as someone who is always hungry for the next challenge and adventure.
Like the moon on the water, in a way. When you confront a Zen master, what you're really seeing are not his limitations but yours.
I think of the Dalai Lama as a doctor of the mind offering medicine and specific counsel and cures in the way a great doctor would.
So it is that Lonely Places attract as many lonely people as they produce, and the loneliness we see in them is partly in ourselves.
You can see exile as loss, and then it will be a loss for you. You can treat it as opportunity and then all kinds of benefits accrue.
I'm one of those perverse people who likes being alone. I always took myself to be a community of one. That's what I am comfortable with.
The Dalai Lama would say that meditation is something that can help everyone. But he's aware that it can be misused or things can go wrong.
[The Dalai Lama ] says Western traditions can teach Tibetans a lot about social action, and he thinks some Christians are very good at that.
For citizens who think themselves puppets in the hands of their rulers, nothing is more satisfying than having rulers as puppets in their hands.
The Dalai Lama says that when a Catholic and a Buddhist speak, the Buddhist becomes a deeper Buddhist and the Catholic becomes a deeper Catholic.
To see the Persia of poets and painters, hiding in plain sight behind the much-maligned Iran of our newspaper headlines, would be my fondest wish.
I think it's in human nature to want to have more, to compete with the other and, at some level, to be dissatisfied if someone else has more than you.
When one questions [Dalai Lama's] political actions, it is worth remembering that he's the single most experienced politician on the planet at this moment.
Writing reminds you of how much there is in your life that stands outside your explanations. In that way, it's almost a journey into faith and doubt at once.
I write - though perhaps it sounds pretentious to say so - to make a clearing in the wilderness, to find out what I care about and what exactly to make of it.
You can only make sense of the online world by going offline and by getting the wisdom and emotional clarity to know how to make the best use of the Internet.
Going nowhere isn’t about turning your back on the world; it’s about stepping away now and then so that you can see the world more clearly and love it more deeply.
What we have to do is act as clearly and with as pure motivation as is possible now, and that will sow the seeds for good action maybe in the twenty-second century.
Suffering is a privilege. It moves us toward thinking of essential things and shakes us out of complacency. Calamity cracks you open, moves you to change your ways.
We can't change the world except insofar as we change the way we look at the world - and, in fact, any one of us can make that change, in any direction, at any moment.
The average American teenager sends or receives 75 text messages a day, though one girl in Sacramento managed to handle an average of 10,000 every 24 hours for a month.
I exult in the fact I can see everywhere with a flexible eye; the very notion of home is foreign to me, as the state of foreignness is the closest thing I know to home.
The less you struggle with a problem, the more it's likely to solve itself. The less time you spend frantically running around, the more productive you are likely to be.
My Christmas present to myself each year is to see how much air travel can open up the world and take me to places as far from sheltered California and Japan as possible.
We readily go to the health club when our doctor suggests we need more exercise, but we regularly neglect the 'mental health club' that our well-being more truly requires.
Dalai Lama has not coming to show us his kindness, so that we can enjoy his charisma, he's coming with a specific message for the specific circumstances of the world today.
You can continue your practice, you can exercise kindness, you can practice meditation whether you're in a prison or a millionaire's house, whether you're in India or Tibet.
More and more of us feel like emergency-room physicians, permanently on call, required to heal ourselves but unable to find the prescription for all the clutter on our desk.