This is a curated selection of Sharon Salzberg quotes (primarily sourced from publicly available videos, and personally curated by me on my own lifelong learning journey). This page is intended as a learning resource for educational purposes and only meant to offer an overview/introduction. Short quotes aren’t a substitute for source material, so if this page sparks your interest, explore more deeply by checking out Sharon Salzberg’s books (Amazon).
Page Contents:
- Suffering & Happiness Quotes
- Love & Lovingkindness Quotes
- Interconnection & Interdependence Quotes
- Presence & Mindfulness Quotes
- Meditation & Breathing Quotes
25 Sharon Salzberg Quotes on Lovingkindness, Interconnection, Meditation, & More
Sharon Salzberg Quotes on Suffering & Happiness
“Here was the Buddha saying right out loud, ‘There is suffering in life.’ It sounds so depressing in popular misunderstanding, but it was very freeing to say, ‘Let’s acknowledge this, let’s try to relate to this—not alone and in isolation but as a community of beings who all face this.’” — Sharon Salzberg
“Our assumptions of aloneness and a sense of isolation, our assumptions of fundamental difference, are really assumptions. And we get to question them.” — Sharon Salzberg
“There’s a deep knowing that the construct we live under of ‘self and other’ and ‘us and them’ is just a construct—and we might be able to utilize it, but we needn’t be imprisoned in it.” — Sharon Salzberg
“When we miss the present moment, we miss the happiness that’s always available to us.” — Sharon Salzberg
“I think of happiness as a kind of tremendous inner resource that gives us an ability to care about others as well as ourselves, that gives us an ability to have energy in our work, that really can be a powerful force for good in this world.” — Sharon Salzberg
Sharon Salzberg Quotes on Love & Lovingkindness
“The term ‘lovingkindness’ is the common translation of the word ‘metta’ in the Pali language, the language of the original Buddhist text … The literal translation of ‘metta’ is ‘friendship’, so it’s like developing the art of friendship with ourselves and with others … Metta is a state of the heart—it’s about freedom of the heart and a state of inclusion and paying attention differently to ourselves and to others.” — Sharon Salzberg
“Lovingkindness doesn’t mean you like everybody, it doesn’t mean you approve of everybody, but you know deeply our lives are linked—all to one another … We can respond to one another from that place of understanding. That’s lovingkindness.” — Sharon Salzberg
“(Lovingkindness) is meant to be a live, vital sense of connection—to not feel so isolated, not to isolate others, to have a sense of being a part of a greater whole.” — Sharon Salzberg
“Understanding that truth of life that we’re part of this greater web, this network, that is very much the sense of lovingkindness.” — Sharon Salzberg
“The practice of lovingkindness is like a stretch—it’s an opening, it’s an expansion—it’s being willing to look at ourselves from another angle … The practice of lovingkindness is stretching how we pay attention so that we can come closer to the fundamental truth.” — Sharon Salzberg
Sharon Salzberg Quotes on Interconnection & Interdependence
“The word I try to use most in translating ‘metta’ is ‘connection’. It’s a profound sense of connection to ourselves; it’s a profound knowing that our lives are interconnected, they’re intertwined.” — Sharon Salzberg
“The bottom line truth is that our lives are interconnected and interdependent.” — Sharon Salzberg
“The reality is that we live in an interconnected universe. It’s a world that’s pointing to that all of the time. But our values, our behavior, don’t always reflect that truth.” — Sharon Salzberg
“Interconnection is the fundamental recognition that what happens over there doesn’t nicely stay over there. It ripples out and affects us over here. And what we do—where we put our energy, what we care about—matters because life is interdependent and it’s going to ripple out in just that same way.” — Sharon Salzberg
“When conditions come together for something to arise, it will arise.” — Sharon Salzberg
Sharon Salzberg Quotes on Presence & Mindfulness
“This is how the world comes alive for us—by paying attention instead of sleepwalking, and not noticing, and objectifying all of these many forms of life.” — Sharon Salzberg
“The gift of attention itself is like a gift of love … It’s so rare to be quite fully present, and yet that sense of things is like a gift of love.” — Sharon Salzberg
“The process of concentration is a process of gathering—we gather all that scattered energy and attention, and we bring it together. We rest, we settle.” — Sharon Salzberg
“The practice of mindfulness really means paying attention to all of our experience without the intrusion of so much bias, grasping, aversion, delusion, holding on, pushing away, fear, projecting into the future—so that as we relinquish all of these habits we can be with our experience in a much more clear, free, and open way. And, that is how insight or understanding develops.” — Sharon Salzberg
“Mindfulness means not just knowing what your experience is, but it’s knowing in a certain way so that one isn’t grasping or pushing away—taking an interest in your experience, and that is how one comes to learn so much more deeply the nature of one’s emotions, and thought patterns, and body, and the truth of things like change which are revealed as we pay careful attention.” — Sharon Salzberg
Sharon Salzberg Quotes on Breathing & Meditation
“Meditation is actually a training in attention. We learn to stabilize our attention, open our attention, and refine our attention so that we can be more aware—not only of our inner landscape, but also of what’s happening around us. It teaches us to notice our experience and our responses to those experiences without immediately judging what we see.” — Sharon Salzberg
“No allegiance to a belief system is needed … You don’t have to believe anything in order to feel your breath. You don’t have to call yourself a Buddhist, or a Hindu, or reject anything else. If you’re breathing, you can be meditating.” — Sharon Salzberg
“To understand this training is to understand differently. It’s about learning how to let go more gently, learning how to begin again with more kindness toward ourselves. That’s the life lesson we actually want. We want in our day-to-day life to make a mistake and be able to begin again, to get lost and be able to begin again, to stray from our chosen course and be able to begin again, to lose sight of our aspiration and be able to begin again … The healing is in the return, learning how to begin again. That’s resiliency, that’s open-heartedness, that’s understanding the truth of change and transparency, that’s actualizing our potential.” — Sharon Salzberg
“Remember that our goal is to just let go and begin again. If you have to do that billions of times, that doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong. You’re doing fine … No matter how many times you may have to let go and begin again, it’s not a problem. That’s the point, actually.” — Sharon Salzberg
“An amazing moment in the whole process: we’ve been distracted, we’ve been lost, we’ve been scattered, maybe we’ve fallen asleep, we’re just gone—and then comes the magic moment when we realize, ‘Oh it’s been quite some time since I last felt a breath’. That’s the moment that is really profound because that’s the moment we have the chance to be really different. Instead of chastising ourselves, and blaming ourselves, and condemning ourselves, and feeling like we’re a failure, that’s the moment when we have the opportunity to gently let go … and with great compassion for ourselves, bring our attention back to the feeling of the breath.” — Sharon Salzberg
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