Matthieu Ricard Quotes

If we dedicate a certain amount of time each day to cultivating compassion or any other positive quality, we are likely to attain results, just like when we train the body... Meditation consists of familiarizing ourselves with a new way of being, of managing our thoughts and the way we perceive the world. Through the recent advances in neuroscience it is now possible to evaluate these methods and to verify their impact on the brain and body.

Happiness can be achieved through training the mind.

Whatever you train, you change your brain.

Worry is evidence of an ill-controlled brain; it is merely a stupid waste of time in unpleasantness.

You can lead your brain and inspire it. You can actively shape new neural pathways.

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.

Thinking about all that - what it means to be happy - I think it overloaded your brain.

I thought about the relentless thought-processing, soul-devouring machine that is my brain, and wondered how on earth I was ever going to master it. Then I remembered that line from Jaws and couldn't help smiling: 'We're gonna need a bigger boat.

British researchers found that one smile can generate the same level of brain stimulation as up to 2,000 bars of chocolate. The same study found that smiling is as stimulating as receiving up to 16,000 pounds Sterling in cash. That's like 25 grand a smile.

Recording happiness made it last longer, we felt, and recording sorrow dramatized it and took away its bitterness; and often we settled some problem which beset us even while we wrote about it.

The easiest way to increase happiness is to control your use of time.

Spend two minutes a day scanning the world for three new things you're grateful for. And do that for 21 days, The reason why that's powerful is you're training your brain to scan the world in a new pattern, you're scanning for positives, instead of scanning for threats. It's the fastest way of teaching optimism.

Your brain is always eavesdropping on your thoughts. As it listens, it leans. If you teach it about limitation, your brain will become limited...Teach your brain to be unlimited.

So many people are struggling to create happiness while their brain is inundated by noise. If your brain is receiving too much information, it automatically thinks you're under threat and scans the world for the negative first. Because the brain is limited, whatever you attend to first becomes your reality.

It's nothing short of a whole new brain... animated by a different form of thinking and a new approach to life.

The technique of positive thinking is not a technique that transforms you. It is simply repressing the negative aspects of your personality. It is a method of choice. It cannot help awareness; it goes against awareness. Awareness is always choiceless.

Gratitude feels so good because it is the state of mind closest to your natural state in which you were born to live.

When you get new rules that work, you're changing the physiology of your brain. And then your brain has to reconfigure itself in order to deal with it.

The more you retrain yourself to choose happiness over fear, the more blissful you will be.

To think bad thoughts is really the easiest thing in the world. If you leave your mind to itself it will spiral down into ever increasing unhappiness. To think good thoughts, however, requires effort. This is one of the things that discipline and training is all about.

Happiness is your choice. You can choose today.

When you repeat a new pattern often, you literally change the neural pathways in your brain. This shift helps true change settle in.

Neurons that fire together wire together. You can rewire your brain for higher consciousness by focusing on love.

Every experience in life changes the brain's anatomy.

Just come into stillness. Have your intention be to relax with the breath. That will begin to set in motion a habit that will start to train the mind.