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“pay attention, cultivate self-awareness, feed your strengths, and you will find your way. and once you discover your dharma, pursue it.”

“one can’t plant a garden of beautiful flowers and leave it to thrive on its own. we have to be gardeners of our own lives, planting only the seeds of good intentions, watching to see what they become, and removing the weeds that spring and get in the way.”

“fear motivates us. sometimes it motivates us toward what we want, but sometimes, if we aren’t careful, it limits us with what we think will keep us safe.”

“our fears are more numerous than our dangers, and we suffer more in our imagination than reality.”

“letting go gives us freedom, and freedom is the only condition for happiness. if, in our heart, we still cling to anything—anger, anxiety, or possessions—we cannot be free.”

the right attitude is fundamental to a complexity perspective—social innovation requires that while we may not be able to predict outcomes, certain kinds of interactions are more likely to result in transformation than others.
the art of patience, and have faith in our actions is the way social innovation happens.

“Tomorrow, if we are burned to ashes, those ashes will love and will nestle in the heart of the earth to nourish the flowers. Flowers don’t know how to hate. We will return to the circle of life as flowers, grasses, birds, or clouds to bring people the message of eternal love. Like the village children who, even in this time of war, sing: ‘We will love others forever and ever, hand holding hand...”

“In the depths of our consciousness dwell the seeds of our potentials.”

“The best medicine to chase away the heart’s dark isolation is to make direct contact with life’s sufferings, to touch and share the anxieties and uncertainties of others.”

“...all places on the earth are, more or less, the same. It is our state of mind that ultimately determines things.”

“... we respect Christ as a great teacher but don’t look on him as God. The same is true of Buddha. We respect him as a great teacher, but we don’t worship him as a god.”

“In ancient times, some Vietnamese chose to live in the highlands among wild beasts. They preferred the danger of being eaten alive to living under an oppressive regime.”

“We awoke with the awareness that 24 brand new hours were before us , and we would not allow anyone of anything to violate this time of ours—no meetings, appointments, or waiting for buses. The whole day was for us. We would tend the tea bushes, write, study, or do whatever we wanted to do. We all worked hard at many things, yet we never tired, because everything we did, we did by choice.”

“Watering the seeds of happiness is a very important practice for the sick or dying. All of us have seeds of happiness inside us, and in difficult moments when we are sick or when we are dying, there should be a friend sitting with us to help us touch the seeds of happiness within. Otherwise the seeds of fears, of regret or of despair can easily overwhelm us.”

“Fear is always there within us—the fear of getting old, the fear of getting sick, the fear of dying, the fear of being abandoned by our loved ones. It is very human to be fearful and to worry about it.
The Buddha did not advise us to suppress these fears. The Buddha advised us to invite these fears to the upper level of our consciousness, recognize them and smile at them.”

We all have negative and positive seeds within us.
We have been lucky and that good seeds like kindness, compassion, and fearlessness were watered in us.
If we were not lucky and negative seeds like greed, jealousy, and fear were watered in us, then the positive seeds did not have a chance to grow.

“Everything is under the influence of everything else.”

“When we look deeply, we see that when all ghe conditions are sufficient something will manifest. What manifests does not come from anywhere. And when manifestation ceases, it does not go anywhere.”

“what we should take seriously is the idea that the next stage of history will include not only technological and organizational transformations, but also fundamental transformations in human consciousness and identity. and these could be transformations so fundamental that they will call the very term ‘human’ into question.
—how long do we really have?
no one really knows.”

“as Nietzsche put it, if you have a why to live, you can bear almost any how. a meaningful life extremely satisfying even in the midst of hardship, whereas a neaningless life is a terrible ordeal no matter how comfortable it is.”

“happiness does not really depend on objective conditions of either wealth, health or even community. rather, it depends on the correlation between objective conditions and subjective expectations... when things improve, expectations balloon, and consequently even dramatic improvements in objective conditions can leave us dissatisfied...”