It is awareness of both our shared pain and our longing for happiness that links us to other people and helps us to turn toward them with compassion.

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.

We're trying to set up a movie for me in the near future. It's going to be similar to the story of how I got discovered. Kinda like my own version of '8 Mile.'

Washington's birthday is as close to a secular Christmas as any Christian country dare come this side of blasphemy.

An artist needs knowledge and the power of observation only so that he can tell from what he is abstaining, and to be sure that his abstention will not appear artificial or false.

When a man attempts to deal with me by force, I answer him, by force.

Experiences are like hoarded gold. Whenever I dole out a piece of my private suffering, that is when I get letters from all over the world.

Whatever I have not yet learned to tolerate in myself inevitably will appear in my children. In this way, they, like Julia, guide me to a new level of self-awareness and everyone benefits.

I told Leonard, in the immortal words of Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible 2, 'I'm going on vacation. If I tell you where I'm going, then it won't be a vacation.'

I think people inspire me the most. If I meet a person who is incredibly complex, and all of a sudden, I start thinking in rhymes, that person could be a muse.

We need a much better understanding of the climate before making policy choices that would impose substantial economic costs on our Nation.

For he would be thinking of love Till the stars had run away And the shadows eaten the moon.