Peace requires us to surrender our illusions of control. We can love and care for others but we cannot possess our children, lovers, family, or friends. We can assist them, pray for them, and wish them well, yet in the end their happiness and suffering depend on their thoughts and actions, not on our wishes.

The person who betrayed you is sunning themselves on a beach in Hawaii and you're knotted up in hatred. Who is suffering?

Without being aware of it, you take many things as being your identity: your body, your race, your beliefs, your thoughts.

We can always begin again.

With growing awareness, you can see where you're caught or where you suffer or where you create suffering. You can then turn toward the difficulties that arise in your life with compassion, bow, and say, these too are part of human incarnation.

Your happiness and suffering depend on your actions and not on my wishes for you.

We each need to make our lion's roar - to persevere with unshakable courage when faced with all manner of doubts and sorrows and fears - to declare our right to awaken.

When we feel anger toward someone, we can consider that they are a being just like us, who has faced much suffering in life.

We must look at our life without sentimentality, exaggeration or idealism. Does what we are choosing reflect what we most deeply value?

We can easily become loyal to our suffering … but it's not the end of the path.

We must especially learn the art of directing mindfulness into the closed areas of our life.

As we follow a genuine path of practice, our sufferings may seem to increase because we no longer hide from them or from ourselves. When we do not follow the old habits of fantasy and escape, we are left facing the actual problems and contradictions of our life.

It is hard to imagine a world without forgiveness. Without forgiveness life would be unbearable. Without forgiveness our lives are chained, forced to carry the sufferings of the past and repeat them with no release.

Finding a way to extend forgiveness to ourselves is one of our most essential tasks. Just as others have been caught in suffering, so have we. If we look honestly at our life, we can see the sorrows and pain that have led to our own wrongdoing. In this we can finally extend forgiveness to ourselves; we can hold the pain we have caused in compassion. Without such mercy, we will live our own life in exile.

We suffer only until we realize that we can't know anything.

When you realize that suffering and discomfort are the call to inquiry, you may actually begin to look forward to uncomfortable feelings. You may even experience them as friends coming to show you what you have not yet investigated thoroughly enough.

Any story that you tell about yourself causes suffering. There is no authentic story.

If you argue against reality you will suffer.

The way to truly help someone is for me to not get immersed in their suffering.

The ability to understand the cause of your own suffering gives you the ability to understand ours.

I am the perpretor of my suffering - but only all of it.

Your suffering is never caused by the person you're blaming.

Suffering over things that have happened to us is nothing more than an argument with the past.

I do whatever I can to serve peace. My job is the end of suffering.