Top 50 Rick Hanson Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Your brain is like Velcro for negative experiences but Teflon for positive ones.”

— Rick Hanson

2. “If you take care of the minutes, the years will take care of themselves.”

— Rick Hanson

3. “Taking in the good is not about putting a happy shiny face on everything, nor is it about turning away from the hard things in life. It’s about nourishing well-being, contentment, and peace inside that are refuges you can always come from and return to.”

— Rick Hanson

4. “By taking just a few extra seconds to stay with a positive experience – even the comfort in a single breath – you’ll help turn a passing mental state into lasting neural structure.”

— Rick Hanson

5. “The brain is good at learning from bad experiences, but bad at learning from good ones.”

— Rick Hanson

6. “First darts are unpleasant to be sure. But then we add our reactions to them. These reactions are “second darts” – the ones we throw ourselves. Most of our suffering comes from second darts.”

— Rick Hanson

7. “Mammals, including us, become friendly, playful, curious, and creative when they feel safe, satisfied, and connected.”

— Rick Hanson

8. “To become happier, wiser, and more loving, sometimes you have to swim against ancient currents within your nervous system.”

— Rick Hanson

9. “Every time you take in the sense of feeling safe, satisfied, or connected, you stimulate responsive circuits in your brain.”

— Rick Hanson

10. “It’s impossible to change the past or the present: you can only accept all that as it is.”

— Rick Hanson

11. “Stay with the positive experience for five to ten seconds or longer. Open to the feelings in it and try to sense it in your body; let it fill your mind. Enjoy it. Gently encourage the experience to be more intense. Find something fresh or novel about it. Recognize how it’s personally relevant, how it could nourish or help you, or make a difference in your life.”

— Rick Hanson

12. “Every time you take in the good, you build a little bit of neural structure. Doing this a few times a day – for months and even years – will gradually change your brain, and how you feel and act, in far-reaching ways.”

— Rick Hanson

13. “It helps to remember that kindness is its own reward, that consequences often come to others without you needing to bring justice to them yourself, and that you can be assertive without falling into ill will.”

— Rick Hanson

14. “Therefore, you can use your mind to change your brain to benefit your mind – and everyone else.”

— Rick Hanson

15. “Think about the many ways that others will benefit from you being more good-humored, warm-hearted, and savvy. Nurturing your own development isn’t selfish. It’s actually a great gift to other people.”

— Rick Hanson

16. “Only we humans worry about the future, regret the past, and blame ourselves for the present.”

— Rick Hanson

17. “If you can break the link between feeling tones and craving – if you can be with the pleasant without chasing after it, with the unpleasant without resisting it, and with the neutral without ignoring it – then you have cut the chain of suffering, at least for a time.”

— Rick Hanson

18. “I think the sweet spot in life is to pursue your dreams and take care of others with your whole heart while not getting fixated on or stressed out about the results. In this place, you live with purpose and passion but without losing your balance and falling into a sense of pressure, strain, or depletion. This sweet spot is very valuable, so take it in whenever you experience it.”

— Rick Hanson

19. “Anger is also an effective way to hide hurt and vulnerability, assert status or dominance, push away fear, and compensate for feeling small or weak. In relationships, arguing or bickering can serve the purpose of keeping others at a comfortable distance. A saying describes anger as a poisoned barb with a honeyed tip.”

— Rick Hanson

20. “Equanimity is neither apathy nor indifference: you are warmly engaged with the world but not troubled by it. Through its nonreactivity, it creates a great space for compassion, loving-kindness, and joy at the good fortune of others.”

— Rick Hanson

21. “Neurons that fire together, wire together.”

— Rick Hanson

22. “Just before bed, your mind is very receptive, so no matter what went wrong that day, find something that went right, open to it, and let good feelings come and ease you into sleep. Doing.”

— Rick Hanson

23. “Love and hate: they live and tumble together in every heart, like wolf cubs tussling in a cave. There is no killing the wolf of hate; the aversion in such an attempt would actually create what you’re trying to destroy. But you can watch that wolf carefully, keep it tethered, and limit its alarm, righteousness, grievances, resentments, contempt, and prejudice. Meanwhile, keep nourishing and encouraging the wolf of love.”

— Rick Hanson

24. “One way to focus and express kind intentions is through these traditional wishes, which you can think, write down, or even sing: May you be safe. May you be healthy. May you be happy. May you live with ease.”

— Rick Hanson

25. “See the collateral damage – the suffering – that results when you cling to your desires and opinions or take things personally. Over the long haul, most of what we argue about with others really doesn’t matter that much.”

— Rick Hanson

26. “Negative experiences create vicious cycles by making you pessimistic, overreactive, and inclined to go negative yourself. Avoiding.”

— Rick Hanson

27. “Even if you, like me, have done things worthy of remorse, they do not wipe out your good qualities; you are still a fundamentally good person.”

— Rick Hanson

28. “It’s a remarkable fact that the people who have gone the very deepest into the mind – the sages and saints of every religious tradition – all say essentially the same thing: your fundamental nature is pure, conscious, peaceful, radiant, loving, and wise, and it is joined in mysterious ways with the ultimate underpinnings of reality, by whatever name we give That.”

— Rick Hanson

29. “Three Poisons: greed makes me rigid about how I want things to be, hatred gets me all bothered and angry, and delusion tricks me into taking the situation personally. Saddest.”

— Rick Hanson

30. “The remedy is not to suppress negative experiences; when they happen, they happen. Rather, it is to foster positive experiences – and in particular, to take them in so they become a permanent part of you.”

— Rick Hanson

31. “Whatever positive facts you find, bring a mindful awareness to them – open up to them and let them affect you. It’s like sitting down to a banquet: don’t just look at it – dig in!”

— Rick Hanson

32. “Pay attention to the number of times a day you categorize someone as “not like me,” particularly in subtle ways: not my social background, not my style, and so on. It’s startling how routine it is. See what happens to your mind when you consciously release this distinction and focus instead on what you have in common with that person, on what makes you both an “us.”

— Rick Hanson

33. “One way the self grows is by equating itself to things – by identifying with them. Unfortunately, when you identify with something, you make its fate your own – and yet, everything in this world ultimately ends. So be mindful of how you identify with positions, objects, and people.”

— Rick Hanson

34. “In terms of building neural structure, what matters is not the event or circumstance or condition itself but your experience of it. Knowing without feeling is like a menu without a meal.”

— Rick Hanson

35. “Being for yourself simply means that you care about yourself. You wish to feel happy instead of worried, sad, guilty, or angry. You want people to treat you well instead of badly. You want to help your future self – the person you’ll be next week, next year, next decade – to have as good a life as possible.”

— Rick Hanson

36. “Every human being has three basic needs – safety, satisfaction, and connection – that are grounded in our ancient evolutionary history.”

— Rick Hanson

37. “Resentment is when I take poison and wait for you to die.”

— Rick Hanson

38. “Ultimately, happiness comes down to choosing between the discomfort of becoming aware of your mental afflictions and the discomfort of being ruled by them. – Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche Some.”

— Rick Hanson

39. “Inner strengths are the supplies you’ve got in your pack as you make your way down the twisting and often hard road of life.”

— Rick Hanson

40. “Positive experiences can also be used to soothe, balance, and even replace negative ones. When two things are held in mind at the same time, they start to connect with each other. That’s one reason why talking about hard things with someone who’s supportive can be so healing: painful feelings and memories get infused with the comfort, encouragement, and closeness you experience with the other person.”

— Rick Hanson

41. “Richard and I both believe that something transcendental is involved with the mind, consciousness, and the path of awakening – call it God, Spirit, Buddha-nature, the Ground, or by no name at all. Whatever it is, by definition it’s beyond the physical universe. Since it cannot be proven one way or another, it is important – and consistent with the spirit of science – to respect it as a possibility.”

— Rick Hanson

42. “Piglet noticed that even though he had a Very Small Heart, it could hold a rather large amount of Gratitude. – A. A. Milne.”

— Rick Hanson

43. “In the simulator, upsetting events from the past play again and again, which unfortunately strengthens the neural associations between an event and its painful feelings.”

— Rick Hanson

44. “There is a saying in Tibet: “If you take care of the minutes, the years will take care of themselves.” What’s the most important minute in life? I think it’s the next one. There is nothing we can do about the past, and we have limited influence over the hours and days to come. But the next minute – minute after minute after minute – is always full of possibility.”

— Rick Hanson

45. “It’s a general moral principle that the more power you have over someone, the greater your duty to use that power benevolently. Well, who is the one person in the world you have the greatest power over? It’s your future self. You hold that life in your hands, and what it will be depends on how you care for it.”

— Rick Hanson

46. “Mindfulness helps you open up to the deeper layers of yourself.”

— Rick Hanson

47. “Mindfulness just means being fully aware of something, in the moment with it, and not judging or resisting it.”

— Rick Hanson

48. “Most fears are exaggerated. As you go through life, your brain acquires expectations based on your experiences, particularly negative ones.”

— Rick Hanson

49. “You are settling into simply being in the present, letting go of the past and not fearing or planning the future. Nothing to fix, no other place to go, no one you have to be. Rest and relax as a whole body breathing.”

— Rick Hanson

50. “Simply having useful, enjoyable experiences is not enough.”

— Rick Hanson