“One day some people came to the master and asked: How can you be happy in a world of such impermanence, where you cannot protect your loved ones from harm, illness or death?”

There are people who are born and die and never once are aware of their breath going in and out of their body. That’s how far away they live from themselves

We will come to understand that everything in the world is our teacher.

When we gain some understanding we need to chew on it again so that we see it for ourselves with certainty: paccattam.

Happiness and suffering do not depend on being poor or rich, they depend on having the right or wrong understanding in our mind.

Steady practice is keeping mindful in every posture, whether sitting, walking, standing or lying down.

To give up doing evil is more important than making merit.

The ladle is in the soup pot every day, but it doesn’t know the taste of the soup. You must reflect and meditate.

These days people don’t search for the Truth. People study simply in order to find knowledge necessary to make a living.

Isn’t it wonderful how the sky can take that dirty water and change it into pure, clean water? Your mind can do the same with your defilements if you let it.

People go through life blindly, ignoring death like revellers at a party feasting on fine foods. They ignore that later they will have to go to the toilet, so they do not bother to find out where there is one.

If you let go completely you will have complete peace.

No. It’s simply a thorn. It doesn’t give suffering to anybody. If we step on it, we suffer immediately.

Letting go a little brings a little peace. Letting go a lot brings a lot of peace. Letting go completely brings complete peace.

If it isn’t good, let it die. If it doesn’t die, make it good.

If you let go a lot you will have a lot of happiness. If you let go completely you will be free.

Whatever he taught, we should practise it. Only bowing to him is not enough. We need to renounce, give up, stop, so that we may see the Buddha.

The tragedy of this world is that no one is happy, whether stuck in atime of pain or of joy.

I’m still happy with the way Einstein’s Dreams came out. That book came out of a single inspiration. I really felt like I was not creating the words, that I was hearing the words.

I gotta keep busy. I’m not happy unless I’m working on two, three things.

There are two things that I get a lot of pleasure from in my life, and that is, doing what I know how to do well – that really makes me happy.

I’m not “happy” but I’m not unhappy about it.

You want to have fun but you also want to work well. Sometimes I was quite happy at Ferrari, because we would have fun, but then they could not stop having fun and go back to the real work.

Happy relationships are boring. We all want them in our own life. But I don’t want to watch them on TV.

It isn’t necessary to be rich and famous to be happy. It’s only necessary to be rich.