Whether someone believes something or not, believer or non-believer, as long as you are a member of the human family, you need warm human feeling, warmhearted feeling.
Love and kindness are the very basis of society. If we lose these feelings, society will face tremendous difficulties; the survival of humanity will be endangered.
To develop patience, you need someone who willfully hurts you. Such people give us real opportunities to practice tolerance. They test our inner strength in a way that even our guru cannot. Basically, patience protects us from being discouraged.
Humans are not machines-we are something more. We have feeling and experience. Material comforts are not sufficient to satisfy us. We need something deeper-human affection.
Anger and hatred cannot bring harmony. The noble task of arms control and disarmament cannot be accomplished by confrontation and condemnation. Hostile attitudes only serve to heat up the situation, whereas a true sense of respect gradually cools down what otherwise could become explosive. We must recognize the frequent contradictions between short-term benefit and long-term harm.
Compassion suits our physical condition, whereas anger, fear and distrust are harmful to our well-being. Therefore, just as we learn the importance of physical hygiene to physical health, to ensure healthy minds, we need to learn some kind of emotional hygiene.
While it is all very well to distinguish happiness that is transient from that which is lasting, between ephemeral and genuine happiness, the only happiness it is meaningful to speak of when a person is dying from thirst is access to water.
We all wish to live a happy life. In addition, we all have the same right to fulfil this goal. And we all have the potential to do so for the simple reason that future is not fixed, it can be changed. Therefore, we should live in hope that we really can overcome whatever problems we face.
We can make this a more peaceful century if we cherish non-violence and concern for others’ well-being. It is possible. If the individual is happier, his or her family is happier; if families are happy, neighborhoods and nations will be happy. By transforming ourselves we can change our human way of life and make this a century of compassion.
The creatures that inhabit this earth-be they human beings or animals-are here to contribute, each in its own particular way, to the beauty and prosperity of the world.