“If you are successful, it is because somewhere, sometime, someone gave you a life or an idea that started you in the right direction. Remember also that you are indebted to life until you help some less fortunate person, just as you were helped.”

You can have the best vaccines for a woman or her child, but if you can’t get her to come and get them then they won’t work.

It is still just unbelievable to us that diarrhea is one of the leading causes of child deaths in the world.

Housework comes first, so girls often fall behind in school. Global statistics show that it’s increasingly girls, not boys, who don’t know how to read.

All lives have an equal value.

Any social or cultural change has to be made openly and with people agreeing. You don’t get there by just pushing an outsider’s point of view.

Men make different investments than women do. Women tend to invest more of their earnings than men do in their family’s well-being – as much as 10 times more.

If you don’t have an effective teacher in front of the classroom, you won’t change the trajectory for students.

Having children made us look differently at all these things that we take for granted, like taking your child to get a vaccine against measles or polio.

When we invest in women and girls, we are investing in the people who invest in everyone else.

I realized that the only way to get into a good college was to be valedictorian or salutatorian. So that was my goal.

When we invest in women, we invest in a powerful source of global development.

Women speaking up for themselves and for those around them is the strongest force we have to change the world.

The biggest killers of children around the world are two things: diarrhea and pneumonia. When you think about it, in the United States, kids don’t die of diarrhea anymore, but it’s a huge problem in the developing world.

Now we just really need to do the work, which we’re doing, to get contraceptives out to women worldwide.

We [with Bill Gates] started to make decisions about what we’d invest in. Then I actually started traveling for the foundation. I’ve probably been to India now eight times at least and Africa numerous times.

Bill [Gates] and I believe philanthropy can only be effective if it starts things and proves whether they actually work or not. That’s the place that governments often don’t want to, or can’t, work.

So many of us start along the spiritual path because we are suffering. But you must realize that for real healing to occur, there must first be deep compassion for yourself, especially the parts of yourself you dislike or consider ugly.

Be kinder to yourself. And then let your kindness flood the world.

If we live in our oneness-heart, we will feel the essence of all religions which is the love of God. Forgiveness, compassion, tolerance, brotherhood and the feeling of oneness are the signs of a true religion.

The grief we carry is part of the grief of the world. Hold it gently. Let it be honored. You do not have to keep it in anymore. You can let go into the heart of compassion; you can weep.

It is not a case we are treating; it is a living, palpitating, alas, too often suffering fellow creature.

Life is so hard, how can we be anything but kind?

Compassion for ourselves gives rise to the power to transform resentment into forgiveness, hatred into friendliness, and fear into respect for all beings.

If your compassion does not include yourself, it is incomplete.