Matthieu Ricard
Neuroscience has proven that similar areas of the brain are activated both in the person who suffers and in the one who feels empathy. Thus, empathic suffering is a true experience of suffering.Collection: Experience
Empathy is the faculty to resonate with the feelings of others. When we meet someone who is joyful, we smile. When we witness someone in pain, we suffer in resonance with his or her suffering.Collection: Smile
Negative emotions like hatred destroy our peace of mind.Collection: Peace
Mind training is based on the idea that two opposite mental factors cannot happen at the same time. You could go from love to hate. But you cannot, at the same time - toward the same object, the same person - want to harm and want to do good.
I got really involved in science research and the science of meditation.
That's what Buddhism has been trying to unravel - the mechanism of happiness and suffering. It is a science of the mind.
By breaking down our sense of self-importance, all we lose is a parasite that has long infected our minds. What we gain in return is freedom, openness of mind, spontaneity, simplicity, altruism: all qualities inherent in happiness.Collection: Buddhism
For a few moments, be aware of your potential for change. Whatever your present situation is, evolution and transformation are always possible. At the least, you can change your way of seeing things and then, gradually, your way of being as well.Collection: Way
Worries are pointless. If there's a solution, there's no need to worry. If no solution exists, there's no point to worry.Collection: Yoga
Happiness is the result of inner maturity. It depends on us alone, and requires patient work, carried out from day to day. Happiness must be built, and this requires time and effort. In the long term, happiness and unhappiness are therefore a way of being, or a life skill.Collection: Maturity
Nothing goes right on the outside when nothing is going right on the inside.Collection: Wisdom
At each point in our lives, we are at a crossroads. We are the fruit of our past and we are the architects of our future... If you want to know your past, look at your present circumstances. If you want to know your future, look at what is in your mind.Collection: Past
Happiness is not the endless pursuit of pleasant experiences - that sounds more like a recipe for exhaustion - but a way of being that results from cultivating a benevolent mind, emotional balance, inner freedom, inner peace, and wisdom. Each of these qualities is a skill that can be enhanced through training the mind.Collection: Emotional
To love oneself is to love life. It is essential to understand that we make ourselves happy in making others happy.Collection: Love Life
True freedom means freeing oneself from the dictates of the ego and its accompanying emotions.Collection: Mean
By happiness I mean here a deep sense of flourishing that arises from an exceptionally healthy mind. This is not a mere pleasurable feeling, a fleeting emotion, or a mood, but an optimal state of being. Happiness is also a way of interpreting the world, since while it may be difficult to change the world, it is always possible to change the way we look at it.Collection: Happiness
While it may be difficult to change the world, it is always possible to change the way we look at it.Collection: Looks
Happiness is a skill, emotional balance is a skill, compassion and altruism are skills, and like any skill they need to be developed. That's what education is about.Collection: Emotional
The basic root of happiness lies in our minds; outer circumstances are nothing more than adverse or favourable.Collection: Lying
Authentic happiness is not linked to an activity, it is a state of being.Collection: States
Transform our way of perceiving things, we transform the quality of our lives.Collection: Quality
Envy and jealousy stem from the fundamental inability to rejoice at someone else's happiness or successCollection: Buddhism
When the mind is full of memories and preoccupied by the future, it misses the freshness of the present moment. In this way, we fail to recognize the luminous simplicity of mind that is always present behind the veils of thought.Collection: Memories
We deal with our mind from morning till evening, and it can be our best friend or our worst enemy.Collection: Morning
Happiness is a state of inner fulfillment, not the gratification of inexhaustible desires for outward things.Collection: Happiness
The mind is malleable. Our life can be greatly transformed by even a minimal change in how we manage our thoughts and perceive and interpret the world. Happiness is a skill. It requires effort and time.Collection: Skills
Humility does not mean believing oneself to be inferior, but to be freed from self-importance. It is a state of natural simplicity which is in harmony with our true nature and allows us to taste the freshness of the present moment.Collection: Wisdom
We do all kinds of things to remain beautiful. Yet, we spend surprisingly little time taking care of what matters most - the way our mind functions.Collection: Beautiful
When hearing a door creak, the optimist thinks it's opening and the pessimist thinks it's closing.Collection: Thinking
The ultimate reason for meditating is to transform ourselves in order to be better able to transform the world or, to put it another way, to transform ourselves so we can become better human beings in order to serve others in a wiser and more efficient way. It gives your life the noblest possible meaning.Collection: Life
Anyone who enjoys inner peace is no more broken by failure as he is inflated by success. He is able to fully live his experiences in the context of a vast and profound serenity, since he understands that experiences are ephemeral and that it is useless to cling to them.Collection: Broken
Changing your attitude has a curative effect... Maybe you can go directly to a change of mind, a change of attitude.Collection: Attitude
If there is a remedy or a cure, a solution to a problem or difficulty, why worry?Collection: Worry
[You] can dramatically change [your emotions] to be more altruistic, more loving, more compassionate, more attentive, and especially to have an inner sort of confidence and strength that you know that you have the resources to deal with whatever comes your way.Collection: Way
You're not insensitive or indifferent, but you're also not vulnerable to the upheavals that cause emotional stress because you can buffer that... So that's the result of meditation; you could call that emotional balance.Collection: Stress
If you don't have altruism, inner strength, inner peace, attention, then it's a trauma. It makes a difficult life for you and for others.Collection: Inner Peace
You should really stop worrying, develop the real wish to live and with a good motivation, [such as] "I have a better life and I can put that life at the benefit of others."Collection: Motivation
Neuroscience has proven that similar areas of the brain are activated both in the person who suffers and in the one who feels empathy. Thus empathic suffering is a true experience of suffering.Collection: Empathy
Just be free, and at least you will go through adversity with a stronger mind, and therefore, you'll be less affected, and pain will affect you less.Collection: Pain
You get [something] in your body that is the suffering or the problem, and then you [add] a second one, which is worry. In both cases, [it is] pointless.Collection: Worry
Too much involvement with one's feeling [is destructive]. If they have too much self-centered feelings, they get in trouble.Collection: Self
I think if your direction in life is clear and if you develop the wish to accomplish/have a fulfilled life and to contribute something to others, I think that definitely gives you such a strength to want to be alive, that that would be the best placebo.Collection: Thinking
Meditation is about cultivating constructive emotions, like altruism, compassion.Collection: Compassion
[Some of the people I'd met] were wonderful people as human beings, and some people were more difficult. I could not see a correlation between their particular genius in playing chess and music and mathematics, etc. ... with human qualities. Some were really good, wonderful people, and some were difficult characters, but there was no clear correlation. But when I met some spiritual masters, [I thought that] there had to be a correlation, and it turned out to be true.Collection: Spiritual
What counts is not the enormity of the task, but the size of the courage.Collection: Buddhism
If you see the humanity in the world, grains of sand that bring everything to a halt - corruption, clashes of egos, human factors more than resources. So, how to avoid that? There’s a lack of human maturity. So it’s not been a fertile exercise to perfect yourself to some extent before you serve others, otherwise it’s like cutting the wheat when it’s still green. And nobody is fed by that. So we need a minimum of readiness to efficiently and wisely be at the service of others. So compassion needs also to be sort of enlightened by wisdom. Otherwise, it’s blind.Collection: Cutting
I was born in France. My father was a renowned French philosopher and journalist, and my mother was a painter. So I grew up in Parisian intellectual circles.Collection: Mother
You can't be at the same time a spiritual master and someone who is always angry. It doesn't work.Collection: Spiritual
We have known about the placebo effect for many years. This is a remarkable effect - placebo can cure 30 percent in many cases.Collection: Placebo Effect
Good and evil exist only in terms of the happiness or suffering they create in ourselves and othersCollection: Evil