The Art of reading through Pandemic (Covid-19): Quotes from “The Book of Joy”
What we need the most now is Solidarity rooted in Peace. Here are some heartwarming quotes by His Holiness of the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu to care and bring joy to one another.
I decided to take my own 30-day writing challenge back to Hawai’i memories after breaking news about a death record on the island. I collect quotes from books because I think quotes carry an initial power with itself without the reader’s added views.
In 2017, I moved to Paradise for two years. Besides my school books, I found such joy in being able to grab a soul-healing books and sit outside in nature with all the time I had. A true luxury!
My go-to books were mostly wisdom oriented ones. One of them was “The Book of Joy” and as a daily routine, I sat by a peaceful little stream we had outside the dorms to digest them wisdom to guide me through some questions I could not seem to find an answer.
As we experience a global crisis together, we need solidarity and unity more than anything. We’re witnessing a shift towards the Globalized world we lived in just few weeks ago. De-globalization and isolation seem to be the effective steps in the short-run but I hope we realize that the true antidote is cooperation in the long-run.
For everyone out there staying at home just like me, I share these quotes as a reminder to have some hope and a deeper belief in unity, peace, and cooperation that’s beyond religious belief, nationality and race. What each one of us can do individually in chaos is to control our own behavior, and practice peace through what we write, what we share and what we tell one another.
Quotes for the soul:
“There’s a Tibetan saying: ‘Wherever you have friends that’s your country, and wherever you receive love, that’s your home.’”
“We are wired to be caring for the other and generous to one another. We shrivel when we are not able to interact. I mean that is part of the reason why solitary confinement is such a horrendous punishment. We depend on the other in order for us to be fully who we are. (…) The concept of Ubuntu says: A person is a person through other persons.”
“The more time you spend thinking about yourself, the more suffering you will experience.”
“The problem is that our world and our education remain focused exclusively on external, materialistic values. We are not concerned enough with inner values. Those who grow up with this kind of education live in a materialistic life and eventually the whole society becomes materialistic. But this culture is not sufficient to tackle our human problems. The real problem is here, Mind and Heart”
“Adversity, illness, and death are real and inevitable. We chose whether to add to these unavoidable facts of life with the suffering that we create in our own minds and hearts… the chosen suffering. The more we make a different choice, to heal our own suffering, the more we can turn to others and help to address their suffering with the laughter-filled, tear-stained eyes of the heart. And the more we turn away from our self-regard to wipe the tears from the eyes of another, the more- incredibly- we are able to hear, to heal, and to transcend our own suffering. This is the true secret to joy.”
“From the moment of birth, every human being wants to discover happiness and avoid suffering. No differences in our culture or our education or our religion affect this. From the very core of our being, we simply desire joy and contentment. But so often these feelings are fleeting and hard to find, like a butterfly that lands on us and then flutters away. “The”
“As the Dalai Lama put it, “In fact, taking care of others, helping others, ultimately is the way to discover your own joy and to have a happy life.”
“I’ve sometimes joked and said God doesn’t know very much math, because when you give to others, it should be that you are subtracting from yourself. But in this incredible kind of way — I’ve certainly found that to be the case so many times — you gave and it then seems like in fact you are making space for more to be given to you”
“Joy is the reward, really, of seeking to give joy to others. When you show compassion, when you show caring, when you show love to others, do things for others, in a wonderful way you have a deep joy that you can get in no other way. You can’t buy it with money. You can be the richest person on Earth, but if you care only about yourself, I can bet my bottom dollar you will not be happy and joyful. But when you are caring, compassionate, more concerned about the welfare of others than about your own, wonderfully, wonderfully, you suddenly feel a warm glow in your heart, because you have, in fact, wiped the tears from the eyes of another.”