This page lists some of the all-time best Sharon Salzberg quotes. Enjoy!
Page Contents:
- Suffering & Happiness Quotes
- Love & Lovingkindness Quotes
- Interconnection & Interdependence Quotes
- Presence & Mindfulness Quotes
- Meditation & Breathing Quotes
50+ Sharon Salzberg Quotes on Lovingkindness, Interconnection, Meditation, & More
Sharon Salzberg Quotes on Suffering & Happiness
“Here was the Buddha saying right out loud, ‘There is suffering in life.’ It sounds so depressing in popular misunderstanding, but it was very freeing to say, ‘Let’s acknowledge this, let’s try to relate to this—not alone and in isolation but as a community of beings who all face this.’” — Sharon Salzberg
“Like many people, I come from a family with a great deal of suffering, conflict, loss. And, like for many people, this was never ever spoken about, and so I didn’t know what to do with all of those feelings inside of me. I felt very alone, very isolated.” — Sharon Salzberg
“Our assumptions of aloneness and a sense of isolation, our assumptions of fundamental difference, are really assumptions. And we get to question them.” — Sharon Salzberg
“There’s a deep knowing that the construct we live under of ‘self and other’ and ‘us and them’ is just a construct—and we might be able to utilize it, but we needn’t be imprisoned in it.” — Sharon Salzberg
“The mind thinks thoughts that we don’t plan.” — Sharon Salzberg
“Most of us are fairly scattered, distracted, kind of all over the place—not in every area of our life maybe, but at least in some.” — Sharon Salzberg
“Sometimes we’re so distracted we can hardly even notice the great things that are coming our way.” — Sharon Salzberg
“One of the great hindrances people face is their expectations.” — Sharon Salzberg
“All beings want to be happy.” — Sharon Salzberg
“The difference between misery and happiness is what we do with our attention.” — Sharon Salzberg
“When we miss the present moment, we miss the happiness that’s always available to us.” — Sharon Salzberg
“I think of happiness as a kind of tremendous inner resource that gives us an ability to care about others as well as ourselves, that gives us an ability to have energy in our work, that really can be a powerful force for good in this world.” — Sharon Salzberg
“There was a possibility to radically alter my life by learning how to actually experience pleasure and joy freely and completely without that extra thing we tend to do of comparing or trying to hold on.” — Sharon Salzberg
“Compassion is the movement of the heart in response to seeing pain or suffering.” — Sharon Salzberg
“Empathy is an essential building block for a state of compassion, but it’s also not considered sufficient for a state of compassion.” — Sharon Salzberg
Sharon Salzberg Quotes on Love & Lovingkindness
“The term ‘lovingkindness’ is the common translation of the word ‘metta’ in the Pali language, the language of the original Buddhist text … The literal translation of ‘metta’ is ‘friendship’, so it’s like developing the art of friendship with ourselves and with others … Metta is a state of the heart—it’s about freedom of the heart and a state of inclusion and paying attention differently to ourselves and to others.” — Sharon Salzberg
“The fundamental question is, what do we think love is? And does it bring us down? Does it make us stupid? Does it make us sentimental? Or, can it be this kind of clarifying vision of the way the world actually is and how we can respond to it?” — Sharon Salzberg
“Love doesn’t mean you like everybody. It actually doesn’t even mean you necessarily like anybody. But we do understand our lives have something to do with one another. It’s a deep, deep acknowledgement that we do live in this kind of world of connection.” — Sharon Salzberg
“Lovingkindness doesn’t mean you like everybody, it doesn’t mean you approve of everybody, but you know deeply our lives are linked—all to one another … We can respond to one another from that place of understanding. That’s lovingkindness.” — Sharon Salzberg
“(Lovingkindness) is meant to be a live, vital sense of connection—to not feel so isolated, not to isolate others, to have a sense of being a part of a greater whole.” — Sharon Salzberg
“Understanding that truth of life that we’re part of this greater web, this network, that is very much the sense of lovingkindness.” — Sharon Salzberg
“The practice of lovingkindness is like a stretch—it’s an opening, it’s an expansion—it’s being willing to look at ourselves from another angle … The practice of lovingkindness is stretching how we pay attention so that we can come closer to the fundamental truth.” — Sharon Salzberg
“The practice of lovingkindness is most likened to a practice of generosity—it’s like generosity of the spirit.” — Sharon Salzberg
“We need some space, we need something bigger—a bigger sense of who we are—and that’s what we cultivate in the practice of lovingkindness.” — Sharon Salzberg
“My favorite sense of lovingkindness is as a capacity—it’s an ability within each of us.” — Sharon Salzberg
“Lovingkindness and compassion grow through insight, through wisdom, through seeing more clearly, understanding things as they actually are especially based on a truth of interconnection—understanding that our lives have something to do with one another, that we live in an interconnected universe.” — Sharon Salzberg
“Wisdom, or insight, or understanding—especially of interconnectedness—brings us to a kind of natural expression of lovingkindness … Being able to see more clearly, to see more accurately, to see the interconnected nature of things, is one of the strongest ways to leap into a sense of lovingkindness.” — Sharon Salzberg
“It just happens to be true that we live in an interconnected universe. Our lives all impact one another, and if we understand this deeply, the response of the heart to this inclusion is lovingkindness … Lovingkindness is precisely a strength because it relates to the truth of how interconnected our lives are.” — Sharon Salzberg
Sharon Salzberg Quotes on Interconnection & Interdependence
“The word I try to use most in translating ‘metta’ is ‘connection’. It’s a profound sense of connection to ourselves; it’s a profound knowing that our lives are interconnected, they’re intertwined.” — Sharon Salzberg
“What’s it like when we’re not considering ourselves separate and apart? Where the kind of constructs of ‘self and other’ and ‘us and them’—the great big ‘other’ out there—are seen as constructs?” — Sharon Salzberg
“Today, with unprecedented threats to our planet and divisions among people, awareness of our interdependence is no longer optional. It’s critical that we widen our attention to include those we encounter as we go about our daily lives.” — Sharon Salzberg
“As our experiences of the universality of suffering grow, our sense of interconnection deepens, and we begin to wish others could be free in a new way, in spite of their actions, their beliefs, or their positions in the world.” — Sharon Salzberg
“The bottom line truth is that our lives are interconnected and interdependent.” — Sharon Salzberg
“The reality is that we live in an interconnected universe. It’s a world that’s pointing to that all of the time. But our values, our behavior, don’t always reflect that truth.” — Sharon Salzberg
“Interconnection is the fundamental recognition that what happens over there doesn’t nicely stay over there. It ripples out and affects us over here. And what we do—where we put our energy, what we care about—matters because life is interdependent and it’s going to ripple out in just that same way.” — Sharon Salzberg
“Every moment of life, every element of life, is part of this web of connection. So, who all helped bring you here?” — Sharon Salzberg
“We’re all brought here by a confluence of conditions, relationships conversations, encounters. So many beings are part of this moment in time. They are part of every moment in time. That’s what this moment is—the coming together of all these conditions.” — Sharon Salzberg
“When conditions come together for something to arise, it will arise.” — Sharon Salzberg
Sharon Salzberg Quotes on Presence & Mindfulness
“This is how the world comes alive for us—by paying attention instead of sleepwalking, and not noticing, and objectifying all of these many forms of life.” — Sharon Salzberg
“Our attention is nearly continually distracted by the thoughts and the feelings that make up stories.” — Sharon Salzberg
“The gift of attention itself is like a gift of love … It’s so rare to be quite fully present, and yet that sense of things is like a gift of love.” — Sharon Salzberg
“We hardly pay attention to what we do have because we’re fixated, we’re obsessed, on what we don’t have.” — Sharon Salzberg
“The process of concentration is a process of gathering—we gather all that scattered energy and attention, and we bring it together. We rest, we settle.” — Sharon Salzberg
“The practice of mindfulness really means paying attention to all of our experience without the intrusion of so much bias, grasping, aversion, delusion, holding on, pushing away, fear, projecting into the future—so that as we relinquish all of these habits we can be with our experience in a much more clear, free, and open way. And, that is how insight or understanding develops.” — Sharon Salzberg
“Mindfulness means not just knowing what your experience is, but it’s knowing in a certain way so that one isn’t grasping or pushing away—taking an interest in your experience, and that is how one comes to learn so much more deeply the nature of one’s emotions, and thought patterns, and body, and the truth of things like change which are revealed as we pay careful attention.” — Sharon Salzberg
“I found out how incredibly transforming it was to anchor my attention in the moment—to the simple act of inhaling and exhaling.” — Sharon Salzberg
Sharon Salzberg Quotes on Breathing & Meditation
“Meditation is actually a training in attention. We learn to stabilize our attention, open our attention, and refine our attention so that we can be more aware—not only of our inner landscape, but also of what’s happening around us. It teaches us to notice our experience and our responses to those experiences without immediately judging what we see.” — Sharon Salzberg
“Feel my breath? I came all the way to India! Where’s the magical, esoteric, fantastic technique that’s going to change my whole life? Feel my breath? I could have stayed in Buffalo to feel my breath. And, then I thought how hard can this be? And, it was like whoa, this is not so easy.” — Sharon Salzberg
“No allegiance to a belief system is needed … You don’t have to believe anything in order to feel your breath. You don’t have to call yourself a Buddhist, or a Hindu, or reject anything else. If you’re breathing, you can be meditating.” — Sharon Salzberg
“Meditation is a practice of resilience.” — Sharon Salzberg
“To understand this training is to understand differently. It’s about learning how to let go more gently, learning how to begin again with more kindness toward ourselves. That’s the life lesson we actually want. We want in our day-to-day life to make a mistake and be able to begin again, to get lost and be able to begin again, to stray from our chosen course and be able to begin again, to lose sight of our aspiration and be able to begin again … The healing is in the return, learning how to begin again. That’s resiliency, that’s open-heartedness, that’s understanding the truth of change and transparency, that’s actualizing our potential.” — Sharon Salzberg
“Remember that our goal is to just let go and begin again. If you have to do that billions of times, that doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong. You’re doing fine … No matter how many times you may have to let go and begin again, it’s not a problem. That’s the point, actually.” — Sharon Salzberg
“The most important moment is the moment after you’ve been distracted, after you’ve been lost.” — Sharon Salzberg
“An amazing moment in the whole process: we’ve been distracted, we’ve been lost, we’ve been scattered, maybe we’ve fallen asleep, we’re just gone—and then comes the magic moment when we realize, ‘Oh it’s been quite some time since I last felt a breath’. That’s the moment that is really profound because that’s the moment we have the chance to be really different. Instead of chastising ourselves, and blaming ourselves, and condemning ourselves, and feeling like we’re a failure, that’s the moment when we have the opportunity to gently let go … and with great compassion for ourselves, bring our attention back to the feeling of the breath.” — Sharon Salzberg
“Equanimity doesn’t mean indifference, coldness, or withdrawal. It means balance—the balance born of wisdom. It’s like perspective.” — Sharon Salzberg
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