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Kindle Notes & Highlights
“Every sentient being, even my enemy, fears suffering as I do and wants to be happy.
Seeking happiness while remaining indifferent to others is a tragic mistake.”
Every practitioner must first transform himself before he is able to serve others effectively.
Concentrating our efforts solely on ourselves and our relatives, in the short term, is one of the regrettable manifestations of egocentrism.
Where the rest of us see a stranger, altruists see a fellow human being.
“We must use a real individual as the focus of our meditation, and then enhance our compassion and loving-kindness toward that person so that we can really experience compassion and loving-kindness toward others. We work on one person at a time. Otherwise, we might end up meditating on compassion for all in a very general sense, with no specific focus or power to our meditation.”
“Compassion is a melting of the heart at the thought of another’s suffering.”
Like the sun that shines equally over both the “good” and the “bad,” over a magnificent landscape as well as over a pile of trash, impartiality extends to all beings without distinction.
Feelings of insecurity and fear are major obstacles to altruism. If we are affected by the slightest vexation, rebuff, criticism, or insult, we find ourselves weakened by it and think above all of protecting ourselves. The feeling of insecurity leads us to close in on ourselves and to keep our distance from others.
the fundamental cause of suffering is ignorance, the mental confusion that deforms reality
beings behave in a harmful way because they are under the sway of ignorance and the mental poisons that ignorance engenders.
“The rich man has little compassion for the poor man, since he can’t imagine himself poor.”
in order to flourish in life, it is not enough to neutralize negative and disturbing emotions; one must also foster the blossoming of positive emotions.
Everything is a question of proportion and common sense: if the diminution of suffering is the main criterion, it would be foolish to sacrifice our lasting well-being so that the other can enjoy a minor advantage.
we are not autonomous entities and our happiness can only be constructed with the help of others. Even if we feel as if we are the center of the world, that world remains the world of other people.
the joy they feel in uniting their efforts to achieve a common aim; they assert that these moments of shared labor and cooperation are among the most valued in daily life.
No one can resist the call of love. You always give in after a while.
We didn’t wait for humans to be fair, we created Social Security, taxes, a State governed by laws. So I think that the whole art of politics is to make selfish individuals more intelligent,
In order to reconcile altruism and selfishness, politics were invented, which is a way to be selfish together and intelligently, rather than stupidly against each other.
The genetic predispositions that influence our character traits are thus almost the same today as in Aristotle’s time. The Dalai Lama agrees with this when he states that there is no basic difference between men and women today and those in the Buddha’s time, no more than there is any basic difference between Easterners and Westerners: “We all share,” he often says, “the same human nature, feel the same emotions of joy and sadness, benevolence or anger, and are all trying to avoid suffering. Thus as human beings we are basically the same.”
attention, emotional balance, altruistic love, compassion, and other human qualities can be cultivated,
One of the tragedies of our time seems to be considerably underestimating the ability for transformation of the human mind,
We constantly try to improve the external conditions of our lives, and in the end it’s our mind that experiences the world and that translates this perception as happiness or suffering. If we transform our way of apprehending things, we automatically transform the quality of our life. And this change is possible. It results from training the mind, which is also called “meditation.”
If we truly want to integrate altruism and compassion into our mindstream, we have to cultivate these qualities over long periods of time, anchor them in our minds, maintain them, and reinforce them until they become a lasting part of our mental landscape.
“individuals will never live satisfying lives except in a society where people care for each other and promote others’ good as well as their own. The pursuit of personal success relative to others cannot create a happy society, since one person’s success necessarily involves another’s failure
The idea that I am free to do anything I want in my own little world, so long as it doesn’t harm anyone, is based on an overly narrow view of human relations.
“We should gain more by letting the world see what we are than by trying to seem what we are not.”57
