These are times when sympathetic joy comes naturally, but in a complex relationship the heart may not leap up so easily.

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.

Would you like to be a brilliant conversationalist? Just give your natural enthusiasm free reign and say whatever comes into your head. Your rashness will be taken for extraordinary courage.

I do not have much liking for the too famous existential philosophy, and, to tell the truth, I think its conclusions false.

To make it more familiar to me, I ended up treating my swordplay scenes like choreography. So it was, 'One and two and three and four and five, and turn and step and down and up and lunge.

Miracles happen every day. They bubble up from their hidden source, surround us with opportunities and disappear.

If the power to do hard work is not a skill, it's the best possible substitute for it.

Stride with a proud disdain through the swamp of human inadmissibility.

Humiliation is the beginning of sanctification.

I don't pull, I just receive.

An efficient government is dangerous in the hands of the wrong man. Sadly, the right sort of man never seems interested in the job.

I tend to find characters who lack vulnerability dull.