Sharon Salzberg, born August 5, 1952 in New York is a famous author and teacher focused on Buddhism and meditation.
Raised in a troubled family, she discovered Buddhism during university, which deeply influenced her life.
In 1974, Salzberg co-founded the Insight Meditation Society in Massachusetts, later establishing the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies and a meditation retreat center.
She’s well-known for her writings, particularly her 1995 book, ‘Lovingkindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness’. Salzberg’s work, recognized by institutions like the New York Open Center, primarily explores vipassana (insight) and metta (loving-kindness), promoting meditation globally through her retreats, teachings and publications.
Let’s jump straight into some of the best quotes by Sharon Salzberg.
Best Sharon Salzberg Quotes
When you’re wide open, the world is a good place. ~ Sharon Salzberg.
Meditation is a tool for helping us accept the profound fact that everything changes all the time. ~ Sharon Salzberg.
Meditation isn’t about what’s happening; it’s about how you relate to what’s happening. ~ Sharon Salzberg.
You are capable of so much more than we usually dare to imagine. ~ Sharon Salzberg.
All beings want to be happy, yet so very few know how. It is out of ignorance that any of us cause suffering, for ourselves or for others. ~ Sharon Salzberg.
Our practice rather than being about killing the ego is about simply discovering our true nature. ~ 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.
Each decision we make, each action we take, is born out of an intention. ~ Sharon Salzberg.
In order to do anything about the suffering of the world we must have the strength to face it without turning away. ~ Sharon Salzberg.
Find a gap between a trigger event and our usual conditioned response to it and by using that pause to collect ourselves and shift our response. ~ Sharon Salzberg.
We do good because it frees the heart. It opens us to a wellspring of happiness. ~ 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.
The meditation traditions I started and have continued practicing have all emphasized inclusivity: anyone can do this who is interested. ~ Sharon Salzberg.
I will love myself as long as I never make a mistake. ~ Sharon Salzberg.
Famous Sharon Salzberg Quotes
Even in the midst of devastation, something within us always points the way to freedom. ~ Sharon Salzberg.
We need the compassion and the courage to change the conditions that support our suffering. Those conditions are things like ignorance, bitterness, negligence, clinging, and holding on. ~ Sharon Salzberg.
There is no ‘thing’ to let go of, but a concept, an idea of an ego that burdens us. As soon as we posit a ‘thing’ to let go of, we’re in trouble. We need to change our view of reality, not attack a nonexistent entity. ~ Sharon Salzberg.
We spend our lives searching for something we think we don’t have, something that will make us happy. But the key to our deepest happiness lies in changing our vision of where to seek it. ~ Sharon Salzberg.
In those moments when we realize how much we cannot control, we can learn to let go. ~ Sharon Salzberg.
Meditation trains the mind the way physical exercise strengthens the body. ~ Sharon Salzberg.
Compassion allows us to bear witness to suffering, whether it is in ourselves or others, without fear; it allows us to name injustice without hesitation, to act strongly, with all the skill at our disposal. ~ 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.
You should never use the word Karma when talking about someone else, it’s only a concept you should apply to yourself as a matter of investigation. ~ Sharon Salzberg.
Top Sharon Salzberg Quotes
Detachment is not about refusing to feel or not caring or turning away from those you love. Detachment is profoundly honest, grounded firmly in the truth of what is. ~ Sharon Salzberg.
There’s no commodity we can take with us. There is only our lives, whether we live them wisely or whether we live them in ignorance. And this is everything. ~ Sharon Salzberg.
The difference between misery and happiness depends on what we do with our attention. ~ Sharon Salzberg.
Life is like an ever-shifting kaleidoscope – a slight change, and all patterns alter. ~ Sharon Salzberg.
We learn and grow and are transformed not so much by what we do but by why and how we do it. ~ Sharon Salzberg.
Rapture is the gateway to nirvana. ~ Sharon Salzberg.
In a situation of potential conflict, let compassion guide you. ~ Sharon Salzberg.
Each of us has a genuine capacity for love, forgiveness, wisdom and compassion. Meditation awakens these qualities so that we can discover for ourselves the unique happiness that is our birthright. ~ Sharon Salzberg.
With mindfulness, loving kindness, and self-compassion, we can begin to let go of our expectations about how life and those we love should be. ~ Sharon Salzberg.
Popular Sharon Salzberg Quotes
Restore your attention or bring it to a new level by dramatically slowing down whatever you’re doing. ~ 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.
Patience doesn’t mean making a pact with the devil of denial, ignoring our emotions and aspirations. It means being wholeheartedly engaged in the process that’s unfolding, rather than ripping open a budding flower or demanding a caterpillar hurry up and get that chrysalis stage over with. ~ Sharon Salzberg.
Mindfulness isn’t difficult, we just need to remember to do it. ~ Sharon Salzberg.
We can’t control what thoughts and emotions arise within us, nor can we control the universal truth that everything changes. But we can learn to step back and rest in the awareness of what’s happening. That awareness can be our refuge. ~ 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.
True happiness is born of letting go of what is unnecessary. ~ Sharon Salzberg.
Resilience is based on compassion for ourselves as well as compassion for others. ~ Sharon Salzberg.
We need the courage to learn from our past and not live in it. ~ Sharon Salzberg.
Wise Sharon Salzberg Quotes
By prizing heartfulness above faultlessness, we may reap more from our effort because we’re more likely to be changed by it. ~ Sharon Salzberg.
Loving kindness is the spirit of friendship toward yourself and others. ~ Sharon Salzberg.
What you learn about pain in formal meditation can help you relate to it in your daily life. ~ Sharon Salzberg.
Develop a mind so filled with love that it resembles space. ~ Sharon Salzberg.
If we fall, we don’t need self-recrimination or blame or anger – we need a reawakening of our intention and a willingness to re-commit, to be whole-hearted once again. ~ Sharon Salzberg.
Mindfulness allows us to watch our thoughts, see how one thought leads to the next, decide if we’re heading down an unhealthy path, and, if so, let go and change directions. ~ Sharon Salzberg.
Voting is the expression of our commitment to ourselves, one another, this country and this world. ~ Sharon Salzberg.
To remember non-attachment is to remember what freedom is all about. If we get attached, even to a beautiful state of being, we are caught, and ultimately we will suffer. We work to observe anything that comes our way, experience it while it is here, and be able to let go of it. ~ Sharon Salzberg.
Someone who has experienced trauma also has gifts to offer all of us – in their depth, their knowledge of our universal vulnerability, and their experience of the power of compassion. ~ Sharon Salzberg.
Pure generosity emerges when we give without the need for our offering to be received in a certain way. That’s why the best kind of generosity comes from inner abundance, rather than from feeling deficient and hollow, starved for validation. ~ Sharon Salzberg.
Thought-Provoking Sharon Salzberg Quotes
Distraction wastes our energy, concentration restores it. ~ Sharon Salzberg.
What comes up is not nearly as important as how you relate to what comes up. ~ Sharon Salzberg.
Effort is the unconstrained willingness to persevere through difficulty. ~ Sharon Salzberg.
Loving-kindness and compassion are the basis for wise, powerful, sometimes gentle, and sometimes fierce actions that can really make a difference – in our own lives and those of others. ~ Sharon Salzberg.
You could search the whole world over and never find anyone as deserving of your love as yourself. ~ Sharon Salzberg.
We can learn the art of fierce compassion – redefining strength, deconstructing isolation and renewing a sense of community, practicing letting go of rigid us-vs.-them thinking – while cultivating power and clarity in response to difficult situations. ~ 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.
Often in close relationships, the subject being discussed is not the subject at all. ~ 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 appearances to get to a much deeper reality. ~ 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.
When we practice metta, we open continuously to the truth of our actual experience, changing our relationship to life. ~ Sharon Salzberg.
Inspiring Sharon Salzberg Quotes
In our own lives and in our communities, we need to find a way to include others rather than exclude them. We need to find a way to allow our pain and suffering, individually and collectively. ~ Sharon Salzberg.
We can travel a long way in life and do many things, but our deepest happiness is not born from accumulating new experiences. it is born from letting go of what is unnecessary, and knowing ourselves to be always at home. ~ Sharon Salzberg.
Love as a power can go anywhere. It isn’t sentimental. It doesn’t have to be pretty, yet it doesn’t deny pain. ~ 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.
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.
What unites us as human beings is an urge for happiness which at heart is a yearning for union. ~ 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.
Every single moment is expressive of the truth of our lives when we know how to look. ~ Sharon Salzberg.
We often get caught up in our own reactions and forget the vulnerability of the person in front of us. ~ Sharon Salzberg.
The movement of the heart as we practice generosity in the outer world mirrors the movement of the heart when we let go of conditioned views about ourselves on our inner journey. Letting go creates a joyful sense of space in our minds. ~ Sharon Salzberg.
So these were the 75 top Sharon Salzberg quotes and sayings.
If you like these quotes and sayings, then you can also read my other posts on Maria Mitchell quotes and Rosalind Franklin quotes.
