Sharon Salzberg Quotes

61 Sourced Quotes

Loving ourselves opens us to truly knowing ourselves as part of the matrix of existence, inextricably connected to the boundlessness of life... when we see that we are far bigger than the person that is delineated by family or cultural expectations, we realize we are capable of so much more than we usually dare to imagine.

Sharon Salzberg
Seeking is endless. It never comes to a state of rest; it never ceases.

Sharon Salzberg
Metta is the ability to embrace all parts of ourselves, as well as all parts of the world. Practicing metta illuminates our inner integrity because it relieves us of the need to deny different aspects of ourselves.

Sharon Salzberg
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
The difference between misery and happiness depends on what we do with our attention.

Sharon Salzberg
To offer our hearts in faith means recognizing that our hearts are worth something, that we ourselves, in our deepest and truest nature, are of value.

Sharon Salzberg
We need the courage to learn from our past and not live in it.

Sharon Salzberg
Meditation has made me happy, loving, and peaceful-but not every single moment of the day. I still have good times and bad, joy and sorrow. Now I can accept setbacks more easily, with less sense of disappointment and personal failure, because meditation has taught me how to cope with the profound truth that everything changes all the time.

Sharon Salzberg
Mindfulness helps us get better at seeing the difference between what's happening and the stories we tell ourselves about what's happening, stories that get in the way of direct experience. Often such stories treat a fleeting state of mind as if it were our entire and permanent self.

Sharon Salzberg
If you're reading these words, perhaps it's because something has kicked open the door for you, and you're ready to embrace change. It isn't enough to appreciate change from afar, or only in the abstract, or as something that can happen to other people but not to you. We need to create change for ourselves, in a workable way, as part of our everyday lives.

Sharon Salzberg
To relinquish the futile effort to control change is one of the strengthening forces of true detachment & thus true love.

Sharon Salzberg
As I go through all kinds of feelings and experiences in my journey through life — delight, surprise, chagrin, dismay — I hold this question as a guiding light: 'What do I really need right now to be happy?' What I come to over and over again is that only qualities as vast and deep as love, connection and kindness will really make me happy in any sort of enduring way.

Sharon Salzberg
Each decision we make, each action we take, is born out of an intention.

Sharon Salzberg
Even in the midst of devastation, something within us always points the way to freedom.

Sharon Salzberg
Effort is the unconstrained willingness to persevere through difficulty.

Sharon Salzberg
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
The art of concentration is a continual letting go. We let go of what is inessential or distracting. We let go of a thought or a feeling, not because we are afraid of it or because we can't bear to acknowledge it as a part of our experience; but, because it is UNNECESSARY.

Sharon Salzberg
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
When we practice metta, we open continuously to the truth of our actual experience, changing our relationship to life.

Sharon Salzberg
Meditation is the ultimate mobile device; you can use it anywhere, anytime, unobtrusively.

Sharon Salzberg
We are all too often told by someone that we are too old, too young, too different, too much the same, and those comments can be devastating.

Sharon Salzberg
With the practice of meditation we can develop this ability to more fully love ourselves and to more consistently love others.

Sharon Salzberg
We long for permanence but everything in the known universe is transient. That's a fact but one we fight.

Sharon Salzberg
We don't need any sort of religious orientation to lead a life that is ethical, compassionate & kind.

Sharon Salzberg
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
In our usual mind state, we are continually activating the process that in Buddhist terminology is known as 'bhava,' which literally means 'becoming.' In this space of becoming, we are subtly leaning forward into the future, trying to have security based on feeling that we can hold on, we can try to keep things from changing.

Sharon Salzberg
In contrast, compassion manifests in us as the offering of kindness rather than withdrawal. Because compassion is a state of mind that is itself open, abundant and inclusive, it allows us to meet pain more directly. With direct seeing, we know that we are not alone in our suffering and that no one need feel alone when in pain. Seeing our oneness is the beginning of compassion, and it allows us to reach beyond aversion and separation.

Sharon Salzberg
In those moments when we realize how much we cannot control, we can learn to let go.

Sharon Salzberg
Faith is not a commodity we either have or don't have-it is an inner quality that unfolds as we learn to trust our own deepest experience.

Sharon Salzberg
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