Forgiveness is a personal process that doesn’t depend on us having direct contact with the people who have hurt us.

Smiling at someone can have significant health consequences.

Seeking happiness is not the problem. The problem is that we often do not know where and how to find genuine happiness and so make the mistakes that cause suffering for ourselves & others.

When you recognize and reflect on even one good thing about yourself, you are building a bridge to a place of kindness and caring.

Never feel ashamed of your longing for happiness.

Clinging to our ideas of perfection isolates us from life and is a barrier.

For any marginalized group to change the story that society tells about them takes courage and perseverance.

The idea that traumatic residues—or unresolved stories—can be inherited is groundbreaking.

The unconscious mind is a vast repository of experiences and associations that sorts things out much faster than the slow-moving conscious mind.

Buddhism has a term for the happiness we feel at someone else’s success or good fortune. Sympathetic joy, as it is known, invites us to celebrate for others.

Even as we recognize our resentment, bitterness, or jealousy, we can also honor our own wish to be happy, to feel free.

If you want things to change, then you have to change them.

Love is born from disagreeing over something we believe in. Hate is born from disagreeing over something we fear.

To force a man to pay for the violation of his own liberty is indeed an addition of insult to injury.

Of the whole sum of human life no small part is that which consists of a man's relations to his country, and his feelings concerning it.

You know, people think you have to be dumb to skip rope for 45 minutes. No, you have to be able to imagine something else. While you're skipping rope, you have to be able to see something else.

Sleep after toyle, port after stormie seas, Ease after warre, death after life, does greatly please.

I'm always writing. There is always a story brewing in my head.

I'll spend my mornings at the sunshine café.

What are you hiding? No one ever asks that.

Education is not simply to learn to read and write. It's emancipation. It makes you free.