The fleeting experience of pleasure is dependent upon circumstance, on a specific location or moment in time. It is unstable by nature, and the sensation it evokes soon becomes neutral or even unpleasant.

Everything is relation; nothing exists in and of itself, immune to the forces of cause and effect.

As influential as external conditions may be, suffering, like well-being, is essentially an interior state.

We incur suffering but we create unhappiness.

The world of ignorance and suffering—called samsara in Sanskrit—is not a fundamental condition of existence but a mental universe based on our mistaken conception of reality.

Pleasures become obstacles only when they upset the mind’s equilibrium and lead to an obsession with gratification or an aversion to anything that thwarts them.

We all know how very clever and tireless our consumer society is at inventing countless bogus pleasures, laboriously hyped stimulants designed to keep us in a state of emotional tension capable of triggering a kind of mental anesthesia. A Tibetan friend of mine who was contemplating the flashy advertising billboards in New York commented: “They are

We look for happiness outside ourselves when it is basically an inner state of being.

Suffering can be triggered by numerous causes over which we sometimes have some power, and sometimes none.