What makes us heroic? Confronting simultaneously our supreme suffering and our supreme hope.

When we meet real tragedy in life, we can react in two ways-either by losing hope and falling into self-destructive habits or by using the challenge to find our inner strength.

If there is love, there is hope that one may have real families, real brotherhood, real equanimity, real peace. If the love within your mind is lost and you see other beings as enemies, then no matter how much knowledge or education or material comfort you have, only suffering and confusion will ensue.

Our human compassion binds us the one to the other - not in pity or patronizingly, but as human beings who have learnt how to turn our common suffering into hope for the future.

Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.

Now a spark of hope flashes up, then a sea of despair rages, and always pain; always pain, always despair, and always the same.