Famous Quotes & Sayings

Richard Gere

My first encounter with Buddhist dharma would be in my early 20s. Like most young men, I was not particularly happy.

Vera Farmiga

I'm someone who can sit in a Buddhist temple, and I can sit with Pentecostals or with Orthodox Jews, and I still feel like I am in tune with all of them.

Lamar Alexander

It is ironic that Mr. Berger learned of this espionage in exactly the same month that Mr. Gore was attending his now famous fund-raiser with Buddhist nuns in Southern California.

Nhat Hanh

One day I saw a picture of the Buddha on a Buddhist magazine and he was sitting on the grass, and he was sitting on the grass, very peaceful, smiling, and I was impressed. Around me people were not like that, so I had the desire to be someone like him. I nourished that kind of desire until the age of sixteen, when I had the permission from my parents to go and ordain as a Buddhist monk.

Nhat Hanh

The secret of Buddhism is to remove all ideas, all concepts, in order for the truth to have a chance to penetrate, to reveal itself.

Nhat Hanh

When we come into contact with the other person, our thoughts and actions should express our mind of compassion, even if that person says and does things that are not easy to accept. We practice in this way until we see clearly that our love is not contingent upon the other person being lovable.

Nhat Hanh

Your breathing should flow gracefully, like a river, like a watersnake crossing the water, and not like a chain of rugged mountains or the gallop of a horse. To master our breath is to be in control of our bodies and minds. Each time we find ourselves dispersed and find it difficult to gain control of ourselves by different means, the method of watching the breath should always be used.

Nhat Hanh

Do not be idolatrous about or bound to any doctrine, theory, or ideology, even Buddhist ones. All systems of thought are guiding means; they are not absolute truth.

Nhat Hanh

The essence of love and compassion is understanding, the ability to recognize the physical, material, and psychological suffering of others, to put ourselves "inside the skin" of the other. We "go inside" their body, feelings, and mental formations, and witness for ourselves their suffering. Shallow observation as an outsider is not enough to see their suffering. We must become one with the subject of our observation. When we are in contact with another's suffering, a feeling of compassion is born in us. Compassion means, literally, "to suffer with."

Reinhold Niebuhr

The significance of the law of love is precisely that it is not just another law, but a law which transcends all law.

Virginia Woolf

Romantic Love is only an Illusion. A story one makes up in One's Mind about Another Person.

William Wycherley

Poetry in love is no more to be avoided than jealousy.

Rudolf Steiner

For human beings, love is the most important fruit of experience in the sense world.

Wayne Dyer

As you awaken you go beyond the need to perform and achieve when you go beyond it, you begin to develop an increased susceptibility to the love extended by others as well as the uncontrollable urge to extend it. Love becomes what you are.

Tony Parker

I love being under pressure. Even the pressure put on me by the media. That is how you outdo yourself.

Ursula K. Le Guin

Love is the true condition of human life.

Roberto Bolano

Nothing good ever comes of love. What comes of love is always something better

Sarah Dessen

The health of the people I love is all that really matters in this world. Period.

Albert Schweitzer

The purpose of human life is to serve and to show compassion and the will to help others.

Patrick Renn

He was facing a great number of years, regardless. But I think this does show some compassion on the part of the jury.

Richard Davidson

I committed to doing everything I could to put compassion on the scientific map.

Richard Rohr

The two Virtues of Equanimity and Compassion become more available to the person whose ego-shell has been smashed-either by great suffering or by great love-or by both.

William Hogarth

I had rather, if cruelty has been prevented by the four prints [The Four Stages of Cruelty], be maker of them than of the [Raphael] cartoons.

William Blum

Our leaders are cruel because only those willing to be inordinately cruel and remorseless can hold positions of leadership in the foreign policy establishment. People capable of expressing a full human measure of compassion and empathy toward faraway powerless strangers do not become president of the United States, or vice president, or secretary of state, or national security adviser or secretary of the treasury. Nor do they want to.

Tracee Ellis Ross

I like to choose compassion over judgment and curiosity over fear.

Saul Alinsky

The fact that people are poor or discriminated against doesn't necessarily endow them with any special qualities of justice, nobility, charity or compassion.

Said Nursi

Life is a manifestation of unity.