582 Quotes by 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.

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 somewhere so we don’t have to see it.

Equanimity’s strength derives from a combination of understanding and trust. It is based on understanding that the conflict and frustration we feel when we can’t control the world doesn’t come from our inability to do so but rather from the fact that we are trying to control the uncontrollable.

What arises in our experience is much less important than how we relate to what arises in our experience.

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.

The fulfillment we have in owning, in desiring, is temporary and illusory, because there is nothing at all we can have that we will not lose eventually. And so there is always fear.

I’ve been through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened,” Mark Twain once said.

How many pleasures escape our notice because we think we need big, dramatic sensations to feel alive? Mindfulness can allow us to experience fully the moment in front of us – what Thoreau calls ‘the bloom of the present ’ – and to wake up from neutral so we don’t miss the small, rich moments that add up to a dimensional life.

Often we can achieve an even better result when we stumble yet are willing to start over, when we don’t give up after a mistake, when something doesn’t come easily but we throw ourselves into trying, when we’re not afraid to appear less than perfectly polished.