Mindfulness Quotes

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

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

Shame weakens us. It can make us frightened to take on something new. We start to withdraw from whatever might give us pleasure, self-esteem, or a sense of our value.

~ Sharon Salzberg

To imagine the way we think is the singular causative agent of all we go through is to practice cruelty toward ourselves.

~ Sharon Salzberg

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

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

We can use meditation as a way to experiment with new ways of relating to ourselves, even our uncomfortable thoughts.

~ Sharon Salzberg

if we really look at our actions with eyes of love, we see that our lives can be more straightforward, simpler, less sculpted by regret and fear, more in alignment with our deepest values.

~ Sharon Salzberg

Paying attention to the ethical implications of our choices has never been more pressing—or more complicated—than it is today.

~ Sharon Salzberg

Causing harm is never just a one-way street.

~ Sharon Salzberg

If we harm someone else, we’re inevitably also hurting ourselves. Some quality of sensitivity and awareness has to shut down for us to be able to objectify someone else, to deny them as a living, feeling being—someone who wants to be happy, just as we do.

~ Sharon Salzberg

When we do our best to treat others with kindness, it’s often a struggle to determine which actions best express our love and care for ourselves.

~ Sharon Salzberg

When we feel conflicted about a particular decision or action, our bodies often hold the answer—if we take the time to stop and tune in.

~ Sharon Salzberg

You can see your thoughts and emotions arise & create space for them even if they are uncomfortable.

~ Sharon Salzberg

The breath is the first tool for opening the space between the story you tell yourself about love.

~ Sharon Salzberg

I believe that there is only one kind of love—real love—trying to come alive in us despite our limiting assumptions, the distortions of our culture, and the habits of fear, self-condemnation, and isolation that we tend to acquire just by living a life.

~ Sharon Salzberg

Mindfulness practice helps create space between our actual experiences and the reflexive stories we tend to tell about them.

~ Sharon Salzberg

Loving kindness practice helps us move out of the terrain of our default narratives if they tend to be based on fear or disconnection. We become authors of brand-new stories about love.

~ Sharon Salzberg

Meditation is about mindfulness and learning to strip away the illusion, revealing your authentic self and connectedness to everything and everyone.

~ Nanette Mathews

Sure, I've had times it was hard to meditate....But even then I still end up being more calmly agitated.

~ Nanette Mathews

Looking for some peace? Close your eyes, take a few deep breaths....That inner connection and peace are always available to you, at any moment.

~ Nanette Mathews

Meditation can be a refuge, but it is not a practice in which real life is ever excluded. The strength of mindfulness is that it enables us to hold difficult thoughts and feelings in a different way—with awareness, balance, and love

~ Sharon Salzberg

Mindfulness is so much wiser and more robust than our inner critic.

~ Sharon Salzberg

Another way to look at meditation is to view the process of thinking itself as a waterfall, a continual cascading of thought. In cultivating mindfulness we are going beyond or behind our thinking, much the way you might find a vantagepoint in a cave or depression in a rock behind a waterfall. We still see and hear the water, but we are out of the torrent.

~ Jon Kabat-Zinn

We resonate with one another’s sorrows because we are interconnected. Being whole and simultaneously part of a larger whole, we can change the world simply by changing ourselves. If I become a center of love and kindness in this moment, then in a perhaps small but hardly insignificant way, the world now has a nucleus of love and kindness it lacked the moment before. This benefits me and it benefits others.

~ Jon Kabat-Zinn

Nirvana is too simple an experience to be depicted by diagrams.

~ Abhijit Naskar

If you meditate in perfect peace and then flash someone an irritable look because they make noise or their child cries, you are entirely missing the point.

~ Khandro Rinpoche

There is really no natural limit to the practice of loving kindness in meditation or in one’s life. It is an ongoing, ever-expanding realization of interconnectedness. It is also its embodiment. When you can love one tree or one flower or one dog or one place, or one person or yourself for one moment, you can find all people, all places, all suffering, all harmony in that one moment. Practicing in this way is not trying to change anything or get anywhere, although it might look like it on the surface. What it is really doing is uncovering what is always present. Love and kindness are here all the time, somewhere, in fact, everywhere. Usually our ability to touch them and be touched by them lies buried below our own fears and hurts, below our greed and our hatreds, below our desperate clinging to the illusion that we are truly separate and alone. (

~ Jon Kabat-Zinn