Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.

...never again would I allow myself to be made a foot soldier in a conflict I did not understand.

Few persons ever reflect, as I should imagine, that from the evil of other men something of evil is communicated to themselves.

Pride is not the opposite of shame, but its source.

We can't make ourselves happy. That is a foolhardy enterprise. The only thing we can do is make other people happy.

He always said that time was the most precious thing that one person could give to another. You were giving them some of your life.

Attention is the most basic form of love.

People who aren’t fully committed to the values that their activities represent sputter through life, pulled in one direction by their commitments and in another by their spirits.

Walking along with three people, my teacher is sure to be among them.

Pursuit of the truth requires more than imagination: it requires the generation and decisive elimination of alternative possibilities until, ideally, only one remains, and it requires a habitual readiness to attack one’s own convictions. That is the only way real belief can be arrived at.

…our dead are only weights on our backs when we won’t let them walk beside us.

A healthy man wants a thousand things, a sick man only wants one.

…at some point in our lives, we have to let go of the fantasy of creating a better past.

The fact that, within ten years, I lost one world, and after a time rose again, as it were, from spiritual death to find another, seems to me one of the strongest arguments against suicide that life can provide. There may not be - I believe that there is not - resurrection after death, but nothing could prove more conclusively than my own brief but eventful history the fact that resurrection is possible within our limited span of earthly time.

When we forget pain, or underestimate it, or talk about people 'getting used to it', we are really so far losing sight of what the universe, which we wish to conceive adequately, really is.

You have been snared by the delusion that envy has a reciprocal. You assume that there is a flip-side to your painful envy of Michael Chang: namely Michael Chang’s enjoyable feeling of being-envied-by-LaMont-Chu. No such animal.

...comfort can be dangerous. Comfort provides a floor but also a ceiling.

If you shape your life according to nature, you will never be poor; if according to people's opinions, you will never be rich.

The noble person uses things; the lesser man is used by things.

It would have been easy for me to behave the way I always have. But I imagined what a better person might do, and I did that instead.

We can’t have change without loss, which is why so often people say they want change but nonetheless stay exactly the same.

The life of folly is empty of gratitude, full of anxiety: it is focused wholly on the future.

The feeling of being hurried is not usually the result of living a full life and having no time. It is on the contrary born of a vague fear that we are wasting our life. When we do not do the one thing we ought to do, we have no time for anything else- we are the busiest people in the world.