Top 100 Sharon Salzberg Quotes
#1. We learn from conflicts only when we are willing to do so.
Sharon Salzberg
#2. Our vision becomes very narrow when we need things to be a certain way and cannot accept things the way they actually are.
Sharon Salzberg
#3. When we are devoted to the development of kindness, it becomes our ready response, so that reacting from compassion, from caring, is not a question of giving ourselves a lecture: 'I don't really feel like it, but I'd better be helpful, or what would people think?'
Sharon Salzberg
#4. We find greater lightness & ease in our lives as we increasingly care for ourselves & other beings.
Sharon Salzberg
#6. Self-compassion is like a muscle. The more we practice flexing it, especially when life doesn't go exactly according to plan (a frequent scenario for most of us), the stronger and more resilient our compassion muscle becomes.
Sharon Salzberg
#7. Stealth Meditation If you start to feel overwhelmed, take a quick, centering moment - as short as following three breaths - to connect with a deeper sense of yourself.
Sharon Salzberg
#8. Continuous Partial Attention involves an artificial sense of constant crisis, of living in a 24/7, always-on world. It contributes to feeling stressed, overwhelmed, overstimulated, and unfulfilled; it compromises our ability to reflect, to make decisions, and to think creatively. Not
Sharon Salzberg
#9. It's a rare and precious thing to be close to suffering because our society - in many ways - tells us that suffering is wrong. If it's our own suffering, we try to hide it or isolate ourselves. If others are suffering, we're taught to put them away somewhere so we don't have to see it.
Sharon Salzberg
#10. Mindfulness practice helps create space between our actual experiences and the reflexive stories we tend to tell about them.
Sharon Salzberg
#11. We have the power to improve our work lives immeasurably through awareness, compassion, patience & ingenuity.
Sharon Salzberg
#12. Metta sees truly that our integrity is inviolate, no matter what our life situation may be. We do not need to fear anything. We are whole: our deepest happiness is intrinsic to the nature of our minds, and it is not damaged through uncertainty and change.
Sharon Salzberg
#13. The journey to loving ourselves doesn't mean we like everything.
Sharon Salzberg
#14. Training our mind through meditation does not mean forcibly subjugating it or beating it into shape.
Sharon Salzberg
#15. People turn to meditation because they want to make good decisions, break bad habits & bounce back better from disappointments.
Sharon Salzberg
#16. Laughing at your pettiness probably works better than scolding yourself for it.
Sharon Salzberg
#17. One foundation of loving relationships is curiosity, keeping open to the idea that we have much to learn even about those we have been close to for decades.
Sharon Salzberg
#18. If we define ourselves by each of the ever-changing feelings that cascade through us, how will we ever feel at home in our own bodies and minds?
Sharon Salzberg
#19. Mindfulness helps us to set boundaries by revealing what makes us unhappy & what brings us peace.
Sharon Salzberg
#20. The more we practice sympathetic joy, the more we come to realize that the happiness we share with others is inseparable from our own happiness.
Sharon Salzberg
#21. As we practice meditation we are bringing forth ease, presence, compassion, wisdom & trust.
Sharon Salzberg
#22. Cultivation of positive emotions, including self-love and self-respect, strengthens our inner resources and opens us to a broader range of thoughts and actions.
Sharon Salzberg
#23. The practice of loving-kindness is about cultivating love as a trans-formative strength,
Sharon Salzberg
#24. Protection, as we use the word in Buddhism, is actually wisdom, it's insight. Protection is seeing and knowing deeply that all things in our experience arise due to causes, due to conditions coming together in a certain way.
Sharon Salzberg
#25. Concentration Attention Multitasking Boredom Procrastination
Sharon Salzberg
#26. I've been through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened, Mark Twain once said.
Sharon Salzberg
#27. Letting go is an inside job, something only we can do for ourselves.
Sharon Salzberg
#28. Every time we forget to breathe or our minds wander or we're hijacked by feelings or sensations, we gently bring ourselves back to the breath, again and again.
Sharon Salzberg
#29. Science tells us that love not only diminishes the experience of physical pain but can make us - and our beloveds - healthier.
Sharon Salzberg
#30. Mindfulness allows us to shift the angle on our story and to remember that we have the capacity to learn and change in ways that are productive, not self-defeating.
Sharon Salzberg
#32. If you go deeper and deeper into your own heart, you'll be living in a world with less fear, isolation and loneliness.
Sharon Salzberg
#33. Often in close relationships, the subject being discussed is not the subject at all.
Sharon Salzberg
#34. Whatever life presents us, our response can be an expression of our compassion.
Sharon Salzberg
#35. It's difficult to admit to ourselves that we suffer. We feel humiliated, like we should have been able to control our pain. If someone else is suffering, we like to tuck them away, out of sight. It's a cruel, cruel conditioning. There is no controlling the unfolding of life.
Sharon Salzberg
#36. When we practice metta, we open continuously to the truth of our actual experience, changing our relationship to life.
Sharon Salzberg
#37. When emotions are long held and extremely complex, it sometimes takes years for them to enter fully into awareness.
Sharon Salzberg
#38. The key in letting go is practice. Each time we let go, we disentangle ourselves from our expectations and begin to experience things as they are.
Sharon Salzberg
#39. When our focus is on seeking, perfecting, or clinging to romance, the charge is often generated by instability, rather than by an authentic connection with another person.
Sharon Salzberg
#40. Living in a story of a limited self - to any degree - is not love.
Sharon Salzberg
#41. Abiding faith does not depend on borrowed concepts. Rather, it is the magnetic force of a bone-deep, lived understanding, one that draws us to realize our ideals, walk our talk,and act in accord with what we know to be true.
Sharon Salzberg
#42. When we respond to our pain and suffering with love, understanding, and acceptance - for ourselves, as well as others - over time, we can let go of our anger, even when we've been hurt to the core. But that doesn't mean we ever forget.
Sharon Salzberg
#43. What makes awe such a powerful call to love is that it's disruptive. It sneaks up on us. It doesn't ask our permission to wow us; it just does. Awe can arise from a single glance, a sound, a gesture.
Sharon Salzberg
#44. Real forgiveness in close relationships is never easy. It can't be rushed or engineered.
Sharon Salzberg
#45. The fulfillment we have in owning, in desiring, is temporary and illusory, because there is nothing at all we can have that we will not lose eventually. And so there is always fear.
Sharon Salzberg
#46. Sanskrit has different words to describe love for a brother or sister, love for a teacher, love for a partner, love for one's friends, love of nature, and so on. English has only one word, which leads to never-ending confusion.
Sharon Salzberg
#47. It is taught, we too can be enlightened, every one of us. We can be completely freed from the bonds of limitation and conditioned confusion through our own endeavor, inspiration, effort and development. There is a path, and we can traverse it.
Sharon Salzberg
#48. As soon as we ask whether or not a story is true in the present moment, we empower ourselves to re-frame it.
Sharon Salzberg
#49. Awareness levels the playing field. We are all humans doing the best we can.
Sharon Salzberg
#50. As an ability, love is always there as a potential, ready to flourish and
help our lives flourish. As we go up and down in life, as we acquire or
lose, as we are showered with praise or unfairly blamed, always within
there is the ability of love, recognized or not, given life or not.
Sharon Salzberg
#52. For all of us, love can be the natural state of our own being; naturally at peace, naturally connected, because this becomes the reflection of who we simply are.
Sharon Salzberg
#53. We need the compassion and the courage to change the conditions that support our suffering. Those conditions are things like ignorance, bitterness, negligence, clinging, and holding on.
Sharon Salzberg
#54. The good news is that opportunities for love enter our lives unpredictably, whether or not we've perfected self-compassion or befriended our inner critic.
Sharon Salzberg
#55. If we have a very strong commitment, so that we can trust ourselves and be beacons of trust for others no matter what the circumstance, then we're protected from suffering the consequences of many actions. We can be protected from that pain.
Sharon Salzberg
#56. Once someone appears to us primarily as an object, kindness has no place to root.
Sharon Salzberg
#57. Hatred does not help us alleviate our pain even in the slightest.
Sharon Salzberg
#58. When we don't allow setbacks to defeat us, they become opportunities for learning, acceptance, flexibility, and patience.
Sharon Salzberg
#59. Maybe what we really need is to change our relationship to what is, to see who we are with the strength of a generous spirit & a wise heart.
Sharon Salzberg
#60. When we experience dissatisfaction at work, which everyone does we can use our disappointment as fuel to wake up.
Sharon Salzberg
#61. You should never use the word Karma when talking about someone else, it's only a concept you should apply to yourself as a matter of investigation.
Sharon Salzberg
#62. Ask yourself, 'who is the one suffering from this anger? The person who has harmed me has gone on to live their life (or perhaps has died), while I am the one sitting here feeling the persecution, burning and constriction of anger. Out of compassion for myself, to ease my own heart, may I let go.
Sharon Salzberg
#64. Open Awareness The Angle of Vision Leadership Openness Getting Out of The Way Possibilities MEDITATION:
Sharon Salzberg
#65. Love simply, perpetually exists and that it's a matter of psychic housekeeping to make room for it.
Sharon Salzberg
#66. How we traverse the space between us when conflict arises has a profound effect on the health and longevity of our relationships.
Sharon Salzberg
#67. Mindfulness may help you gain insight into your role in conflicts with others, it won't single-highhandedly help you resolve them.
Sharon Salzberg
#68. When we are willing to explore our own experiences, we open the doorway to deeper connection and intimacy.
Sharon Salzberg
#69. I am totally amazed at the spread of interest in meditation. When I first came back from studying in India in 1974, I would be asked in social situations what I did. When I replied, "I teach meditation" they would frequently look at me as though to say "That is weird," and sort of sidle away.
Sharon Salzberg
#70. There is a sentiment common among most of us when it comes to love - letting go can feel scary.
Sharon Salzberg
#71. Love and concern for all are not things some of us are born with and others are not. Rather, they are results of what we do with our minds: We can choose to transform our minds so that they embody love, or we can allow them to develop habits and false concepts of separation.
Sharon Salzberg
#72. Pain is tough, but it's going to leave us. Pleasure is wonderful, but it's going to leave us. You can't hang on to pleasure; you can't stop pain from coming; you can be aware.
Sharon Salzberg
#73. The movement of the heart as we practice generosity in the outer world mirrors the movement of the heart when we let go of conditioned views about ourselves on our inner journey. Letting go creates a joyful sense of space in our minds
Sharon Salzberg
#75. By accepting and learning to embrace the inevitable sorrows of life, we realize that we can experience a more enduring sense of happiness.
Sharon Salzberg
#76. Be open to the possibility that there are other paths available to you in relating to yourself and to another.
Sharon Salzberg
#77. Grief helps us to relinquish the illusion that the past could be different from what it was.
Sharon Salzberg
#78. We can't give the truth to someone as an object, we can only point to it, inviting inspection. It is in that spirit that we can hear or read a teaching and then look at our own lives, at our own experiences to see whether anything might have been revealed about them.
Sharon Salzberg
#79. We can discover the capacity of the mind to be aware, to love, to begin again
Sharon Salzberg
#80. To imagine the way we think is the singular causative agent of all we go through is to practice cruelty toward ourselves.
Sharon Salzberg
#81. Compassion Judgment Loving-Kindness Compassion Is A Force Disconnection Self-Blame and Compassion Praise and Blame
Sharon Salzberg
#82. The most common response I hear when I tell people I teach meditation is, "I'm so stressed out. I could use some of that!" A response I also sometimes hear, which amuses me a lot is, "My partner should really meet you!"
Sharon Salzberg
#83. Although love is often depicted as starry-eyed and sweet, love for the self is made of tougher stuff.
Sharon Salzberg
#84. Voting is the expression of our commitment to ourselves, one another, this country and this world.
Sharon Salzberg
#85. I think we spend so much of our lives trying to pretend that we know what's going to happen next. In fact we don't. To recognize that we don't know even what will happen this afternoon and yet having the courage to move forward - that's one meaning of faith.
Sharon Salzberg
#86. We cannot instantaneously force ourselves to forgive - and forgiveness happens at a different pace for everyone and is dependent on the particulars of any given situation.
Sharon Salzberg
#87. While you are meditating, if your mind wanders, gently bring it back to the present moment.
Sharon Salzberg
#88. When we believe a wounding story, our whole world is diminished.
Sharon Salzberg
#89. Meditation is essentially training our attention so that we can be more aware - not only of our own inner workings but also of what's happening around us in the here & now.
Sharon Salzberg
#90. From our first breath to our last, we're presented again and again with the opportunity to experience deep, lasting, and trans-formative connection with other beings: to love them and be loved by them; to show them our true natures and to recognize theirs.
Sharon Salzberg
#91. Each opportunity to interrupt the onslaught of thoughts and return to the object of meditation is, in fact, a moment of enlightenment
Sharon Salzberg
#92. Effort is the unconstrained willingness to persevere through difficulty.
Sharon Salzberg
#93. It is awareness of both our shared pain and our longing for happiness that links us to other people and helps us to turn toward them with compassion.
Sharon Salzberg
#94. Love is a living capacity within us that is always present, even when we don't sense it.
Sharon Salzberg
#95. Through meditation we come to know that we are dying & being reborn in every moment.
Sharon Salzberg
#96. The starting place for radical re-imagining of love is mindfulness.
Sharon Salzberg
#98. It's affirming that we can look at any experience from the fullness of our being and get past the shame we carry.
Sharon Salzberg
#99. We can understand the inherent radiance & purity of our minds by understanding metta. Like the mind, metta is not distorted by what it encounters.
Sharon Salzberg
#100. There is so much we just can't see or know right now, including precisely how our actions will ripple out.
Sharon Salzberg
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
