Famous Quotes & Sayings

Sharon Salzberg

The embodiment of kindness is often made difficult by our long ingrained patterns of fear & jealousy.

Sharon Salzberg

One of the things that I think makes it hard in this society for us to tell the truth is the kind of conventional relationship to adversity. Things aren't always easy and rather than being taught to have kindness to ourselves and others in the light of that we're taught something very different; that it's wrong and rejected - that's a lot of conditioning to step away from.

Sharon Salzberg

I have seen that there are a number of people who benefit from doing loving kindness meditation, either prior to or along with mindfulness meditation. It varies from person to person of course, but for many, their practice of mindfulness will bring along old habits of self-judgment and ruthless criticism, so it is not actually mindfulness.

Sharon Salzberg

Mindfulness needs to not be judgmental to really be mindfulness, which means it needs a basis of loving kindness.

Sharon Salzberg

Loving kindness is the spirit of friendship toward yourself and others.

Sharon Salzberg

As I go through all kinds of feelings and experiences in my journey through life -- delight, surprise, chagrin, dismay -- I hold this question as a guiding light: 'What do I really need right now to be happy?' What I come to over and over again is that only qualities as vast and deep as love, connection and kindness will really make me happy in any sort of enduring way.

Tara Brach

By regarding ourselves with kindness, we begin to dissolve the identity of an isolated, deficient self. This creates the grounds for including others in an unconditionally loving heart.

Tara Brach

The intimacy that arises in listening and speaking truth is only possible if we can open to the vulnerability of our own hearts. Breathing in, contacting the life that is right here, is our first step. Once we have held ourselves with kindness, we can touch others in a vital and healing way.

Svetlana Alliluyeva

As a result of half a century of Soviet rule people have been weaned from a belief in human kindness.

Swami Vivekananda

Buddha taught kindness towards lower beings; and since then there has not been a sect in India that has not taught charity to all beings, even to animals. This kindness, this mercy, this charity - greater than any doctrine - are what Buddhism left to us.

Sophia Loren

I have my own peculiar yardstick for measuring a man: Does he have the courage to cry in a moment of grief? Does he have the compassion not to hunt an animal? In his relationship with a woman, is he gentle? Real manliness is nurtured in kindness and gentleness, which I associate with intelligence, comprehension, tolerance, justice, education, and high morality. If only men realized how easy it is to open a woman's heart with kindness, and how many women close their hearts to the assaults of the Don Juans.

Tom Regan

It is not an act of kindness to treat animals respectfully. It is an act of justice.

Simone Weil

A hurtful act is the transference to others of the degradation which we bear in ourselves.

Simone Weil

Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.

Simon Sinek

It is a luxury to put our interests first. It is an honor to put the interests of others before our own.

Thomas Merton

I just remember their kindness and goodness to me, and their peacefulness and their utter simplicity. They inspired real reverence, and I think, in a way, they were certainly saints. And they were saints in that most effective and telling way: sanctified by leading ordinary lives in a completely supernatural manner, sanctified by obscurity, by usual skills, by common tasks, by routine, but skills, tasks, routine which received a supernatural form from grace within.

Thomas Carlyle

A laugh, to be joyous, must flow from a joyous heart, for without kindness, there can be no true joy.

Thomas Carlyle

Without kindness there can be no true joy.

Tony Kushner

You have a good heart and you think the good thing is to be guilty and kind but it's not always kind to be gentle and soft, there's a genuine violence softness and kindness visit on people. Sometimes self-interested is the most generous thing you can be.

Shirley Jackson

It was a house without kindness, never meant to be lived in, not a fit place for people or for love or for hope. Exorcism cannot alter the countenance of a house ; Hill House would stay as it was until it was destroyed.

Robert A. Heinlein

From the strictest humanitarian viewpoint, any attempt to stop the processes by which over crowded cities purge themselves is not a kindness.

Tilda Swinton

I've been on the other side of the table many times, trying to get people to be sympathetic to projects, and I've been the victim of that kind of intense kindness masking extreme stupidity.

Thomas Szasz

Men often treat others worse than they treat themselves, but they rarely treat anyone better. It is the height of folly to expect consideration and decency from a person who mistreats himself.

Thomas Jefferson

we defer therefore till this time twelve month to avail ourselves of the instruction of that place, and particularly of your kindness in the two branches of Botany and Natural history to which we wish him particularly to apply.

Steven Seagal

My philosophy is that the most important aspect of any religion should be human kindness. And to try to ease the suffering of others. To try to bring light and love into the lives of mankind.

Tom Shadyac

I think true success is intrinsic... It's love. It's kindness. It's community.

Thomas Chalmers

Write your name in kindness, love and mercy on the hearts of the thousands you come in contact with year by year, and you will never be forgotten.

Victor Hugo

The sadness which reigned everywhere was but an excuse for unfailing kindness.

Victor Hugo

The great acts of love are done by those who are habitually performing small acts of kindness.

Vernon Howard

Genuine kindness is not what we do, it is what we are.

Veronica Roth

We've all started to put down the virtues of the other factions in the process of bolstering our own. I don't want to do that. I want to be brave, and selfless, and smart, and kind, and honest." He clears his throat. "I continually struggle with kindness.

Robert Foster Bennett

True popularity comes from acts of kindness rather than acts of stupidity.

Robert Frost

It takes all sorts of in and outdoor schooling To get adapted to my kind of fooling.