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Who really said it

If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion

Attributed to Dalai Lama born 6 July 1935 · Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama; Tibetan Buddhist spiritual leader
Attributed In copyright

This is credited to the Dalai Lama everywhere it appears, and it restates a point he has made in public for decades — that compassion serves the person practising it as much as its object. What we could not find is a primary source: no book, speech or interview of his that we could reach contains the sentence. The earliest documented appearance is a daily-meditations anthology from 2000 that quotes him without saying where from.

Last verified 4 Oct 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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Unconfirmed quote & credit

“If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion” Attributed to the 14th Dalai Lama; earliest located source: Anne Wilson Schaef, Meditations for Living In Balance (2000), p. 11

Can you use it?

Still under copyright (rights held by His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama and his publishers). A short, credited quote is generally fine for talks, teaching, and internal decks; for commercial, published, or large-scale reuse, get permission.

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In context

Evoking the world of Dalai Lama — Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama; Tibetan Buddhist leader and 1989 Nobel Peace laureate. Theme: "If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

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Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Provenance

The source

Attributed to
Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama (b. 1935)
Earliest source located
“Meditations for Living In Balance” by Anne Wilson Schaef (2000), p. 11
Nature of that source
A daily-meditations anthology quoting him — not a work of his own
Primary source
None located

If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.

There is no fuller context to show, because we could not find the sentence in any work by the Dalai Lama. What is reproduced here is the quotation as it is recorded on Wikiquote, which cites it as quoted in Anne Wilson Schaef’s 2000 anthology.

Wikiquote: Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama

How we verified this

  • Wikiquote’s page for the 14th Dalai Lama ↗ carries the sentence and sources it precisely one step: “As quoted in Meditations for Living In Balance: Daily Solutions for People Who Do Too Much (2000) by Anne Wilson Schaef, p. 11.” An “as quoted in” citation is a report of a quotation, not a primary source.
  • We confirmed that the Schaef book exists as cited — the Internet Archive’s catalogue record ↗ gives the title, the author and the year 2000. We could not read its page 11: the scan is lending-restricted, so we are not claiming to have seen the sentence in it.
  • We also searched Quote Investigator, which has published no investigation of this line, so there is no specialist finding to defer to here — that is our own search result, not a claim we can cite. Many popular pages assign the quote to the 1998 book “The Art of Happiness” ↗, but every instance of that claim we found traces back to user-submitted quotation sites, and we could not verify it against the book.
  • The Dalai Lama’s date of birth, 6 July 1935, is confirmed against his Wikipedia entry ↗.
In copyright

The Dalai Lama was born in 1935, so everything he has said or published falls far on the copyright side of the 1931 United States public-domain cutoff — whichever work first carried these words, they are in copyright. Because we could not identify that work, no edition is named here.

Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.

Context

Why it mattered

The line works by repetition: the same instruction answers two different questions. Whether you set out to help other people or to feel better yourself, the prescribed action does not change — which is a compact way of saying that the division between the two is less real than it looks.

That is a recognisably Buddhist argument rather than a greetings-card sentiment, and it is one the Dalai Lama has made in plainer prose for years: compassion is not a sacrifice you make for others but the most reliable route to your own peace of mind.

The same instruction answers both questions.

Read the full story

A note on why this page says “attributed” rather than “verified.” We are confident the thought is his; what we cannot do is point to the book, speech or interview where he said it in these words. That gap matters, because quotation anthologies are exactly where polished paraphrases enter circulation looking like transcripts.

His Nobel acceptance speech of 1989 puts the same idea in the register he actually uses when speaking: “true happiness comes from a sense of inner peace and contentment, which in turn must be achieved through the cultivation of altruism, of love and compassion.” That sentence is sourced; the aphorism on this page, so far, is not.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Kindness Happiness Love

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Wikiquote: 14th Dalai Lamaen.wikiquote.org

The sourced collection of his quotations, including this line and the anthology it is credited to.
14th Dalai Lamaen.wikipedia.org

Biography, exile, and the 1989 Nobel Peace Prize.
Meditations for Living In Balancearchive.org

Catalogue record for the 2000 Anne Wilson Schaef anthology that Wikiquote names as the source.
Anne Wilson Schaefen.wikipedia.org

The American author who compiled the anthology in which the quotation first appears on the record.
The Art of Happinessarchive.org

Catalogue record for the 1998 book popularly named as the source. We could not confirm the sentence in it; the scan is lending-restricted.

The author

About the 14th Dalai Lama

Dalai Lama

born 6 July 1935 · Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama; Tibetan Buddhist leader and 1989 Nobel Peace laureate

His Holiness Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, was born to a farming family in Amdo in 1935 and recognised as the Dalai Lama as a small child. He has lived in exile in India since 1959, and spent the following decades arguing a consistent case: that compassion is not a religious ornament but a practical requirement for human societies, and that it can be cultivated with or without religion. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Earliest documented source (Chicago)

Schaef, Anne Wilson. Meditations for Living In Balance: Daily Solutions for People Who Do Too Much. 2000, 11. Quoting the 14th Dalai Lama; no primary source in his own works has been located.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.’?” Last verified 4 Oct 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/if-you-want-others-to-be-happy-practice-compassion-if-you/

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