Top 200 Sharon Salzberg Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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.”

— Sharon Salzberg

102. “The key to cultivating confidence in ourselves is understanding our right to make the truth our own.”

— Sharon Salzberg

103. “I’m learning that to be at home everywhere, I have to be sure to include the place I actually live.”

— Sharon Salzberg

104. “Wholehearted acceptance is a basic element of love, starting with love for ourselves, and a gateway to joy. Through the practices of loving kindness and self-compassion, we can learn to love our flawed and imperfect selves. And in those moments of vulnerability, we open our hearts to connect with each other, as well. We are not perfect, but we are enough.”

— Sharon Salzberg

105. “Cultivating loving kindness for ourselves is the foundation of real love for our friends and family, for new people we encounter in our daily lives, for all beings and for life itself.”

— Sharon Salzberg

106. “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.”

— Sharon Salzberg

107. “Connecting to your breath when thoughts or images arise is like spotting a friend in a crowd: you don’t have to shove everyone else aside or order them to go away; you just direct your attention, your enthusiasm, your interest toward your friend. ‘Oh,’ you think, ’there’s my friend in that crowd. Oh, there’s my breath, among those thoughts and feelings and sensations.”

— Sharon Salzberg

108. “Trying to impose our personal agenda on someone else’s experience is the shadow side of love, while real love recognizes that life unfolds at its own pace.”

— Sharon Salzberg

109. “Even on the spiritual path, we have things we’ll tend to cover up or be in denial about.”

— Sharon Salzberg

110. “For all of us, love can be the natural state of our own being; naturally at peace, naturally connected, because this becomes the reflection of who we simply are.”

— Sharon Salzberg

111. “It’s interesting that people bring different things to oppressive and difficult situations, when they’re reduced to the barest terms of survival. That’s what provides tension in a lot of films.”

— Sharon Salzberg

112. “Meditation isn’t about what’s happening; it’s about how you relate to what’s happening.”

— Sharon Salzberg

113. “I’ve always said that lovingkindness and compassion are inevitably woven throughout meditation practice even if the words are never used or implied, no matter what technique or method we are using.”

— Sharon Salzberg

114. “Anger often makes us hurt ourselves more than any enemy.”

— Sharon Salzberg

115. “My ideal registration system would be an opt-out one, where every single person is registered once they turn 18. In Australia, I’m told, everyone is registered to vote and you pay a fine if you don’t vote.”

— Sharon Salzberg

116. “Respecting differences while gaining insight into our essential connected-ness, we can free ourselves from the impulse to rigidly categorize the world in terms of narrow boundaries and labels.”

— Sharon Salzberg

117. “We like things to manifest right away, and they may not. Many times, we’re just planting a seed and we don’t know exactly how it is going to come to fruition. It’s hard for us to realize that what we see in front of us might not be the end of the story.”

— Sharon Salzberg

118. “Meditation can be a refuge, but it is not a practice in which real life is ever excluded. The strength of mindfulness is that it enables us to hold difficult thoughts and feelings in a different way – with awareness, balance, and love.”

— Sharon Salzberg

119. “Taking responsibility for oneself is by definition an act of kindness.”

— Sharon Salzberg

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

— Sharon Salzberg

121. “It is taught, we too can be enlightened, every one of us. We can be completely freed from the bonds of limitation and conditioned confusion through our own endeavor, inspiration, effort and development. There is a path, and we can traverse it.”

— Sharon Salzberg

122. “While you are meditating, if your mind wanders, gently bring it back to the present moment.”

— Sharon Salzberg

123. “If we turn away from our own pain, we may find ourselves projecting this aversion onto others, seeing them as somehow inadequate for being in a troubled situation.”

— Sharon Salzberg

124. “Everything is impermanent: happiness, sorrow, a great meal, a powerful empire, what we’re feeling, the people around us, ourselves.”

— Sharon Salzberg

125. “Voting is like alchemy – taking an abstract value and breathing life into it.”

— Sharon Salzberg

126. “We all want to be happy. We need to expand the notion of what that means, to make it bigger and wiser.”

— Sharon Salzberg

127. “Everyone loses touch with their aspiration, and we need the heart to return to what we really care about. All of this is based on developing greater lovingkindness and compassion.”

— Sharon Salzberg

128. “Fearful of wasting a second, we hoard time as if it were money.”

— Sharon Salzberg

129. “It is so powerful when we can leave behind our ordinary identities, no longer think of ourselves primarily as a conductor, or writer, or salesclerk, and go to a supportive environment to deeply immerse in meditation practice.”

— Sharon Salzberg

130. “Meditation is a cyclical process that defies analysis, but demands acceptance.”

— Sharon Salzberg

131. “As we work to reweave the strands of connection, we can be supported by the wisdom and lovingkindness of others.”

— Sharon Salzberg

132. “To cherish others is to cherish ourselves. To cherish ourselves is to cherish others. And in that same way, we relate to the truth. If we support it, if we embrace it, if we uphold it, we will be embraced by it, we will be supported and upheld by it.”

— Sharon Salzberg

133. “Whatever life presents us, our response can be an expression of our compassion.”

— Sharon Salzberg

134. “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.”

— Sharon Salzberg

135. “Everyone’s mind wanders, without doubt, and we always have to start over. Everyone resists or dislikes the thought of or is too tired to meditate at times, and we have to be able to begin again.”

— Sharon Salzberg

136. “We so often in our lives serve as mirrors for one another. We look to others to find out if we ourselves are lovable; we look to others to find out if we are capable of feeling love; we look to others for a reflection of our innate radiance.”

— Sharon Salzberg

137. “Desire- grasping, clinging, greed, attachment – is a state of mind that defines what we think we need in order to be happy. We project all of our hopes and dreams of fulfillment onto some object of our attention. This may be a certain activity or outcome, a particular thing or person. Deluded by our temporary enchantment, we view the world with tunnel vision. That object, and that alone, will make us happy.”

— Sharon Salzberg

138. “To sense which gifts to accept which to leave behind is our path to discovering freedom.”

— Sharon Salzberg

139. “Mindfulness is so much wiser and more robust than our inner critic.”

— Sharon Salzberg

140. “This mirroring quality, whereby we “reteach a thing its loveliness,” is one of the greatest attributes of metta. The power of metta enables us to look at people and affirm the rightness of their wish to be happy; it affirms our oneness with them. The power of love reflects both to ourselves and others the manifold possibilities available in each moment.”

— Sharon Salzberg

141. “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.”

— Sharon Salzberg

142. “The starting place for radical re-imagining of love is mindfulness.”

— Sharon Salzberg

143. “Our ability to connect with others is innate, wired into our nervous systems, and we need connection as much as we need physical nourishment.”

— Sharon Salzberg

144. “If we are nothing, there is nothing at all to serve as a barrier to our boundless expression of love. Being nothing in this way, we are also, inevitably, everything. ‘Everything’ does not mean self-aggrandizement, but a decisive recognition of interconnection; we are not separate. Both the clear, open space of ‘nothing’ and the interconnected mess of ‘everything’ awakens us to our true nature.”

— Sharon Salzberg

145. “If we have nothing material to give, we can offer our attention, our energy, our appreciation. The world needs us. It doesn’t deplete us to give.”

— Sharon Salzberg

146. “Sit comfortably, in a relaxed way, and close your eyes. As much as possible, let go of analysis and expectation. For ten to fifteen minutes, call to mind something you have done or said that you feel was a kind or good action – a time you were generous, or caring, or contributed to someone’s well-being. If something comes to mind, allow the happiness that may come with the remembrance. If nothing comes to mind, gently turn your attention to a quality you like about yourself.”

— Sharon Salzberg

147. “Narcissistic love has nothing to do with accountability.” In other words, when we cultivate tenderness and compassion for the whole of our experiences – the difficult and hurtful parts, in addition to the triumphs – we naturally behave more kindly and responsibly toward others.”

— Sharon Salzberg

148. “The foundation of metta practice is to know how to be our own friend. According to the Buddha, “You can search throughout the entire universe for someone who is more deserving of your love and affection than you are yourself, and that person is not to be found anywhere. You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.”

— Sharon Salzberg

149. “When we bring deep awareness to whatever’s bothering us, the same things might be happening, but we are able to relate to them differently.”

— Sharon Salzberg

150. “The combination of realizing our distinctiveness along with our unity is seeing interdependence.”

— Sharon Salzberg