Sharon Salzberg Quotes

Asking questions is an opportunity for creativity and personal expression, both for the person asking and the person answering.

~ Sharon Salzberg

Restore your attention or bring it to a new level by dramatically slowing down whatever you're doing.

~ Sharon Salzberg

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

~ 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

Let the breath lead the way.

~ Sharon Salzberg

Meditation is a microcosm, a model, a mirror. The skills we practice when we sit are transferable to the rest of our lives.

~ Sharon Salzberg

We use mindfulness to observe the way we cling to pleasant experiences & push away unpleasant ones.

~ Sharon Salzberg

Effort is the unconstrained willingness to persevere through difficulty.

~ 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

Meditation may be done in silence & stillness, by using voice & sound, or by engaging the body in movement. All forms emphasize the training of attention.

~ 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

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. We can open to everything with the healing force of love. When we feel love, our mind is expansive and open enough to include the entirety of life in full awareness, both its pleasures and its pains, we feel neither betrayed by pain or overcome by it, and thus we can contact that which is undamaged within us regardless of the situation. Metta sees truly that our integrity is inviolate, no matter what our life situation may be.

~ Sharon Salzberg

Buddha first taught metta meditation as an antidote: as a way of surmounting terrible fear when it arises.

~ Sharon Salzberg

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

~ Sharon Salzberg

With attachment all that seems to exist is just me & that object I desire.

~ Sharon Salzberg

There’s no denying that it takes effort to set the intention to see our fundamental connected-ness with others.

~ Sharon Salzberg

If we have nothing material to give, we can offer our attention, our energy, our appreciation. The world needs us. It doesn’t deplete us to give.

~ Sharon Salzberg

We’re in charge of our own forgiveness, and the process takes time, patience, and intention.

~ Sharon Salzberg

Kindness is really at the core of what it means to be and feel alive.

~ Sharon Salzberg

Any time we find ourselves relying on the ideas of an absolute, frozen state of right and wrong—or fairness versus unfairness—that we are used to, we can compare the habit to distraction during meditation.

~ Sharon Salzberg

If we truly loved ourselves, we’d never harm another. That is a truly revolutionary, celebratory mode of self-care.

~ Sharon Salzberg

The more we practice mindfulness, the more alert we become to the cost of keeping secrets.

~ Sharon Salzberg

We’re capable of much more than mediocrity, much more than merely getting by in this world.

~ Sharon Salzberg

As human beings, we’re capable of greatness of spirit, an ability to go beyond the circumstances we find ourselves in, to experience a vast sense of connection to all of life.

~ Sharon Salzberg

Our minds tend to race ahead into the future or replay the past, but our bodies are always in the present moment.

~ Sharon Salzberg

The skills available to us through mindfulness make it possible to bring love to our connections with others.

~ Sharon Salzberg

What we learn in meditation, we can apply to all other realms of our lives.

~ Sharon Salzberg

Keeping secrets is a consequential act for all involved.

~ Sharon Salzberg

The environment we create can help heal us or fracture us. This is true not just for buildings and landscapes but also for interactions and relationships.

~ Sharon Salzberg

So often, fear keeps us from being able to say yes to love—perhaps our greatest challenge as human beings.

~ Sharon Salzberg

Learning to treat ourselves lovingly may at first feel like a dangerous experiment.

~ Sharon Salzberg

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

The journey to loving ourselves doesn’t mean we like everything.

~ Sharon Salzberg

When we direct a lot of hostile energy toward the inner critic, we enter into a losing battle.

~ Sharon Salzberg

When we approach the journey acknowledging what we do not know and what we can’t control, we maintain our energy for the quest.

~ Sharon Salzberg

When we relate to ourselves with loving kindness, perfectionism naturally drops away.

~ Sharon Salzberg

Wholehearted acceptance is a basic element of love, starting with love for ourselves, and a gateway to joy. Through the practices of loving kindness and self-compassion, we can learn to love our flawed and imperfect selves. And in those moments of vulnerability, we open our hearts to connect with each other, as well. We are not perfect, but we are enough.

~ Sharon Salzberg

When we contemplate the miracle of embodied life, we begin to partner with our bodies in a kinder way.

~ Sharon Salzberg

Wherever the responsibility lies, shame creates a solid and terrible feeling of unworthiness that resides in our bodies: the storehouse of the memories of our acts, real or imagined, and the secrets we keep about them.

~ Sharon Salzberg

The heart contracts when our bodies are overcome by shame.

~ Sharon Salzberg