Dalai Lama Quotes

I think the difference between finding happiness, or moments of happiness, is how you choose to interpret things. That's a rather shocking responsibility. That we're responsible for our own happiness. It's not those around us.

This life is worth living, we can say, since it is what we make it.

It is not God's will merely that we should be happy, but that we should make ourselves happy.

You are the only thing holding you back from happiness. You have the ability to change your life radically for better or worse.

You cannot make somebody else responsible for your own happiness.

In my later years, I have looked in the mirror each day and found a happy person staring back. Occasionally I wonder why I can be so happy. The answer is that every day of my life I've worked only for myself and for the joy that comes from writing and creating. The image in my mirror is not optimistic, but the result of optimal behavior.

Bader's philosophy was my philosophy. His whole attitude to life was mine.

It takes half your life before you discover life is a do-it-yourself project.

The secret to happiness is freedom... And the secret to freedom is courage.

In the end, I want to be able to say, 'My life was what I made it.'

Everybody eventually discovers that they are an individual with the power to affect their own lives and make it better or not.

As I told the students every time I visited a campus, you are the director of your own movie, and if you aren't enjoying what you are doing, change it.

I invented my life by taking for granted that everything I did not like would have an opposite, which I would like.

I really do see that anywhere I am, whether it's doing interviews a hundred in a row, that every situation I'm in, I'm at choice in the matter.

Dream and give yourself permission to envision a You that you choose to be.

No power in society, no hardship in your condition can depress you, keep you down, in knowledge, power, virtue, influence, but by your own consent.

I think one of the greatest gifts you can give to someone is just access to the possibility of freedom that you don't have to be totally depressed and enslaved by your own environment.

Only I can change my life. No one can do it for me.

I inspire myself.

Your joy comes from how you think, the choices that we make in life.

We're the only ones who can change our reality.

Take responsibility for making your own life beautiful.

Understand that there is no relationship between your inner happiness and your inner joy and the outer things that you experience and behold in the world, that it all begins with you, the world is a mirror to your own Self, when you can look at things and feel joy not in the things but in yourself.

Your success and happiness start with you.

Let each person in relationship worry about Self-what Self is being, doing, and having; what Self is wanting, asking, giving; what Self is seeking, creating, experiencing, and all relationships would magnificently serve their purpose-and their participants!