Speaking in the Norwegian capital, Oslo, she said Western support had contributed to changes in Burma.
Ms Aung San Suu Kyi spent much of the past 24 years under house arrest in Burma. She was freed in late 2010.
She did not travel to collect the prize fearing she would not be allowed back.
Her visit to Oslo is part of a tour of Europe, her first since 1988, which she began in Geneva, at the UN’s International Labour Organisation.
On Saturday, Suu Kyi will meet members of the Burmese community who are exiled and now live in Norway.
Opening the ceremony in Oslo, the chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Thorbjorn Jagland, said:
“Dear Aung San Suu Kyi, we have been waiting for you for a very long time. However we are well aware that your wait has been infinitely trying for you and one entirely of a different nature from ours.
“In your isolation you have become a moral voice for the whole world.”
Mr Jagland described her as “a precious gift to the world community”.
In her Nobel lecture, Ms Suu Kyi said she heard she had received the prize on the radio and it had felt “unreal”.
But at the same time, it had “opened a door in my heart”.
“Often during my days of house arrest it felt as though I were no longer a part of the real world,” she said.
Winning the Nobel Peace Prize “made me real once again. It had drawn me back into the wider human community”.
And she added, the Nobel Peace Prize drew the attention of the world to the struggle for democracy and human rights in Burma.
She described recent reforms in Burma as positive but warned against blind faith.
“My party, the National League for Democracy, and I stand ready and willing to play any role in the process of national reconciliation,” she said.
Aung San Suu Kyi referred to Burma’s ethnic conflicts and ended by saying that receiving the Nobel Peace Prize had strengthened her faith to work for peace.