Quotes by Sharon Salzberg

About Sharon Salzberg:

Sharon Salzberg is a New York Times Best selling author and teacher of Buddhist meditation practices in the West. In 1974, she co-founded the Insight Meditation Society at Barre, Massachusetts with Jack Kornfield and Joseph Goldstein. Her emphasis is on vipassan? (insight) and mett? (loving-kindness) methods, and has been leading meditation retreats around the world for over three decades. All of these methods have their origins in the Theravada Buddhist tradition. Her books include Lovingkindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness (1995), A Heart as Wide as the World (1999) and Real Happiness - The Power of Meditation: A 28-Day Program (2010), which was on the The New York Times Best Seller list in 2011.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Some people have a mistaken idea that all thoughts disappear through meditation and we enter a state of blankness. There certainly are times of great tranquility when concentration is strong and we have few, if any, thoughts. But other times, we can ...

Sharon Salzberg

When you're wide open, the world is a good place.

Sharon Salzberg

There are many different ways to practice meditation; it's good to experiment until you find one that seems to suit you.

Sharon Salzberg

What is important is not getting intoxicated with a good feeling or getting intoxicated even with an insight. These take many forms in our practice. We go through times of great release, where there has been physical holding for what feels like forev...

Sharon Salzberg

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

I think so many people tend to think of faith as blind adherence to a dogma or unquestioned surrender to an authority figure, and the result is losing self-respect and losing our own sense of what is true. And I don't think of faith in those terms at...

Sharon Salzberg

Faith is not a commodity that you either have or don't have enough of, or the right kind of. It's an ongoing process. The opposite of faith is despair.

Sharon Salzberg

We can have skills training in mindfulness so that we are using our attention to perceive something in the present moment. This perception is not so latent by fears or projections into the future, or old habits, and then I can actually stir loving-ki...

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 b...

Sharon Salzberg

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 controlli...

Sharon Salzberg

Voting is like alchemy - taking an abstract value and breathing life into it.

Sharon Salzberg

I've spent quite a bit of my life as a meditation teacher and writer commending the strengths of love and compassion.

Sharon Salzberg

What you learn about pain in formal meditation can help you relate to it in your daily life.

Sharon Salzberg

As we look around, it's very clear that in this world people do outrageous things to one another all of the time. It's not that these qualities or actions make us bad people, but they bring tremendous suffering if we don't know how to work with them.

Sharon Salzberg

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

Things don't just happen in this world of arising and passing away. We don't live in some kind of crazy, accidental universe. Things happen according to certain laws, laws of nature. Laws such as the law of karma, which teaches us that as a certain s...

Sharon Salzberg

We apply our effort to be mindful, to be aware in this very moment, right here and now, and we bring a very wholehearted effort to it. This brings concentration. It is this power of concentration that we use to cut through the world of surface appear...

Sharon Salzberg

I think the associations people have with kindness are often things like meekness and sweetness and maybe sickly sweetness; whereas I do think of kindness as a force, as a power.

Sharon Salzberg

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 s...

Sharon Salzberg

I call myself a meditation teacher rather than a spiritual teacher.

Sharon Salzberg

Sometimes people don't trust the force of kindness. They think love or compassion or kindness will make you weak and kind of stupid and people will take advantage of you; you won't stand up for other people.

Sharon Salzberg

Author Bio

  • NameSharon Salzberg
  • DescriptionAmerican writer
  • Born1952
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionAuthor