The Big Questions Quotes

“pleasure and pain arise from virtuous and non-virtuous actions which come not from outside, but from within yourself.”
― Lama Surya Das, The Big Questions: How to Find Your Own Answers to Life's Essential Mysteries

“Altruistic service is like the tax we gladly pay to contribute to a better world and a more beautiful life.”
― Surya Das, The Big Questions: How to Find Your Own Answers to Life's Essential Mysteries

“Putting down all barriers, let your mind be full of love. Let it pervade all the quarters of the world so that the whole wide world, above, below, and around, is pervaded with love. Let it be sublime and beyond measure so that it abounds everywhere.”
― Lama Surya Das, The Big Questions: How to Find Your Own Answers to Life's Essential Mysteries

“opting for happiness and contentment is a decision that we can make at any time and that needs to be continually remade at every turn.”
― Lama Surya Das, The Big Questions: How to Find Your Own Answers to Life's Essential Mysteries

“Even emotional flux and flow are merely intermittent internal weather conditions, temporary and dreamlike. To practice patient forbearance in the face of some upset, disappointment, or irritation, simply ask yourself, “How much will this matter to me several months or years from now?”
― Surya Das, The Big Questions: How to Find Your Own Answers to Life's Essential Mysteries

“All the happiness and virtue in this world come from selflessness and generosity, all the sorrow from egotism, selfishness, and greed.”
― Lama Surya Das, The Big Questions: How to Find Your Own Answers to Life's Essential Mysteries

“The past is over, and the future is unknown. We can dwell in the imagined worlds of yesterday and tomorrow if we so choose. But the more we do so, the more we miss out on life itself as it is happening, moment by moment, and the more we fail to realize who we actually are, moment by moment.”
― Lama Surya Das, The Big Questions: How to Find Your Own Answers to Life's Essential Mysteries

“Tell me what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
― Lama Surya Das, The Big Questions: How to Find Your Own Answers to Life's Essential Mysteries

“We are obliged to live as if there’s meaning in life, without any guarantee that there is.”
― Lama Surya Das, The Big Questions: How to Find Your Own Answers to Life's Essential Mysteries

“As long as we’re preoccupied with our former traumas and triumphs, or our fears and dreams about what might happen down the road, or who said what to whom, it’s very difficult to appreciate and cherish the intrinsically joyful gift of life right here, now.”
― Lama Surya Das, The Big Questions: How to Find Your Own Answers to Life's Essential Mysteries