Top 200 Sharon Salzberg Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “You are a person worthy of love. You don’t have to do anything to prove that.”

— Sharon Salzberg

152. “What’s really transformative is our willingness to keep going, our openness to possibility, our patience, our effort, our humor, our growing self-knowledge, and the strength that we gain as we keep going.”

— Sharon Salzberg

153. “If you’re reading these words, perhaps it’s because something has kicked open the door for you, and you’re ready to embrace change. It isn’t enough to appreciate change from afar, or only in the abstract, or as something that can happen to other people but not to you. We need to create change for ourselves, in a workable way, as part of our everyday lives.”

— Sharon Salzberg

154. “You don’t have to believe anything, adopt a dogma in order to learn how to meditate.”

— Sharon Salzberg

155. “Cultivation of positive emotions, including self-love and self-respect, strengthens our inner resources and opens us to a broader range of thoughts and actions.”

— Sharon Salzberg

156. “Consider how the sky is unharmed by the clouds that pass through it, whether they are light and fluffy-looking or dark and formidable. A mountain is not moved by the winds blowing over it, whether gentle or fierce. The ocean is not destroyed by the waves moving on its surface, whether high or low. In just that way, no matter what we experience, some aspect of ourselves remains unharmed. This is the innate happiness of awareness.”

— Sharon Salzberg

157. “I call myself a meditation teacher rather than a spiritual teacher.”

— Sharon Salzberg

158. “I’ve spent quite a bit of my life as a meditation teacher and writer commending the strengths of love and compassion.”

— Sharon Salzberg

159. “If I am feeling stupid, angry, jealous, or humiliated, I bring total awareness and acknowledgment to those feelings. I admit my failures and own them. Then I usually start laughing as I realize how small and inconsequential I really am and also how ridiculous my problems are!”

— Sharon Salzberg

160. “My earliest experiences in meditation were in a context of intensive retreats.”

— Sharon Salzberg

161. “With a clear intention and a willing spirit, sooner or later we experience the joy and freedom that arises when we recognize our common humanity with others and see that real love excludes no one.”

— Sharon Salzberg

162. “Mindfulness won’t ensure you’ll win an argument with your sister. Mindfulness won’t enable you to bypass your feelings of anger or hurt either. But it may help you see the conflict in a new way, one that allows you to break through old patterns.”

— Sharon Salzberg

163. “At 9:10 I’m going to be filled with self-hatred.”

— Sharon Salzberg

164. “With the practice of meditation we can develop this ability to more fully love ourselves and to more consistently love others.”

— Sharon Salzberg

165. “To truly love ourselves, we must open to our wholeness, rather than clinging to the shivers of ourselves represented by old stories. Living in a story of a limited self – to any degree – is not love.”

— Sharon Salzberg

166. “Faith is not a commodity we either have or don’t have-it is an inner quality that unfolds as we learn to trust our own deepest experience.”

— Sharon Salzberg

167. “When we learn to respond to disappointments with acceptance, we give ourselves the space to realize that all our experiences – good and bad alike – are opportunities to learn and grow.”

— Sharon Salzberg

168. “When we set an intention to explore our emotional hot spots, we create a pathway to real love.”

— Sharon Salzberg

169. “Compassion isn’t morose; it’s something replenishing and opening; that’s why it makes us happy.”

— Sharon Salzberg

170. “Effort is the unconstrained willingness to persevere through difficulty. It is not a harsh, straining, desperate effort but, rather, an ardent and wholehearted remembrance of our capacity for freedom. Right Effort is willingness to open where we have been closed, to come close to what we have avoided, to be patient with ourselves, and to let go of our preconceptions.”

— Sharon Salzberg

171. “Once someone appears to us primarily as an object, kindness has no place to root.”

— Sharon Salzberg

172. “The Dalai Lama has said: “My religion is kindness.” If we all adopted such a stance and embodied it in thought and action, inner and outer peace would be immediate, for in reality they are never not present, only obscured, waiting to be discovered. This is the work and the power of lovingkindness, the embrace that allows no separation between self, others, and events – the affirmation and honoring of a core goodness in others and in oneself.”

— Sharon Salzberg

173. “The Buddha taught that we can feel pleasure fully, yet without craving or clinging, without defining it as our ultimate happiness. We can feel pain fully without condemning or hating it. And we can experience neutral events by being fully present, so that they are not just fill-in times until something more exciting comes along.”

— Sharon Salzberg

174. “Smiling at someone can have significant health consequences.”

— Sharon Salzberg

175. “To truly love ourselves, we must challenge our beliefs that we need to be different or better.”

— Sharon Salzberg

176. “When we are devoted to the development of kindness, it becomes our ready response, so that reacting from compassion, from caring, is not a question of giving ourselves a lecture: ‘I don’t really feel like it, but I’d better be helpful, or what would people think?’”

— Sharon Salzberg

177. “Doing nothing means unplugging from the compulsion to always keep ourselves busy, the habit of shielding ourselves from certain feelings, the tension of trying to manipulate our experience before we even fully acknowledge what that experience is.”

— Sharon Salzberg

178. “As we practice meditation, we get used to stillness and eventually are able to make friends with the quietness of our sensations.”

— Sharon Salzberg

179. “The Buddha actually described at some length what he meant by being a good friend in the world. He talked about a good friend as someone who is constant in our times of happiness and also in our times of adversity or unhappiness. A friend will not forsake us when we are in trouble nor rejoice in our misfortune. The Buddha described a true friend as being a helper, someone who will protect us when we are unable to take care of ourselves, who will be a refuge to us when we are afraid.”

— Sharon Salzberg

180. “The heart is a generous muscle.”

— Sharon Salzberg

181. “We cannot instantaneously force ourselves to forgive – and forgiveness happens at a different pace for everyone and is dependent on the particulars of any given situation.”

— Sharon Salzberg

182. “As soon as we ask whether or not a story is true in the present moment, we empower ourselves to re-frame it.”

— Sharon Salzberg

183. “Can we allow the lives of others to be different from ours and feel happy for them? Can we rejoice for them as their happiness grows, in whatever way that is happening?”

— Sharon Salzberg

184. “Just as a prism refracts light differently when you change its angle, each experience of love illuminates love in new ways, drawing from an infinite palette of patterns and hues.”

— Sharon Salzberg

185. “Learning to treat ourselves lovingly may at first feel like a dangerous experiment.”

— Sharon Salzberg

186. “Looking at people and communicating that they can be loved, and that they can love in return, is giving them a tremendous gift. It is also a gift to ourselves. We see that we are one with the fabric of life. This is the power of metta: to teach ourselves and our world this inherent loveliness.”

— Sharon Salzberg

187. “Kindness is really at the core of what it means to be and feel alive.”

— Sharon Salzberg

188. “We are all too often told by someone that we are too old, too young, too different, too much the same, and those comments can be devastating.”

— Sharon Salzberg

189. “Forgiveness can be bittersweet. It contains the sweetness of the release of a story that has caused us pain, but also the poignant reminder that even our dearest relationships change over the course of a lifetime.”

— Sharon Salzberg

190. “We’re capable of much more than mediocrity, much more than merely getting by in this world.”

— Sharon Salzberg

191. “Even when we do our very best to treat those close to us with utmost respect and understanding, conflict happens. That’s life. That’s human nature.”

— Sharon Salzberg

192. “We cannot simply forgive and forget, nor should we.”

— Sharon Salzberg

193. “It is awareness of both our shared pain and our longing for happiness that links us to other people and helps us to turn toward them with compassion.”

— Sharon Salzberg

194. “When we respond to our pain and suffering with love, understanding, and acceptance – for ourselves, as well as others – over time, we can let go of our anger, even when we’ve been hurt to the core. But that doesn’t mean we ever forget.”

— Sharon Salzberg

195. “Letting go – abandoning, relinquishing – is actually the same mind state as generosity. So the practice of giving deeply influences the feeling tone of our meditation practice, and vice versa.”

— Sharon Salzberg

196. “Equanimity can be hard to talk about.”

— Sharon Salzberg

197. “If we define ourselves by each of the ever-changing feelings that cascade through us, how will we ever feel at home in our own bodies and minds?”

— Sharon Salzberg

198. “Compassion grows in us when we know how the energy of love is available all around us.”

— Sharon Salzberg

199. “Forgiveness is a personal process that doesn’t depend on us having direct contact with the people who have hurt us.”

— Sharon Salzberg

200. “When we feel conflicted about a particular decision or action, our bodies often hold the answer – if we take the time to stop and tune in.”

— Sharon Salzberg