Pema Chodron Quotes

While we are sitting in meditation, we are simply exploring humanity and all of creation in the form of ourselves. We can become the world's greatest experts on anger, jealousy, and self-deprecatio n, as well as on joyfulness, clarity, and insight. Everything that human beings feel, we feel. We can become extremely wise and sensitive to all of humanity and the whole universe simply by knowing ourselves, just as we are.

I am a human being; nothing human can be alien to me.

I love everything about the human experience.

The true cure for self-righteousness is self-knowledge.

The true artform is being a human being.

It's all about knowing that everybody that you see, everybody that you sit across from is a different aspect of yourself. So once you can accept yourself on every level, that's when everything opens up, that's when the party really begins.

It's easy for us to feel separate from other people and from other forms of life, especially if we don't have a reliable connection to our own inner world. Without insight into our internal cycles of pleasure and pain, desires and fears, there is a strong sense of being removed, apart or disconnected. When we do have an understanding of our inner lives, it provides an intuitive opening, even without words, to the ties that exist between ourselves and others.

Just as true humor is laughter at oneself, true humanity is knowledge of oneself.

There are some persons we could not cut down to size without diminishing ourselves as well.

The degree to which one is sensitive to other people's suffering, to other (people's) humanity, is the index of one's own humanity

Anybody knows who lives with animals, they teach you more about what it is to be a good human than most people: patience, goodheartedness, enthusiasm, presence, forgiveness, focus, restfulness, honesty.

A fool sees himself as another, but a wise man sees others as himself.

You have to start knowing yourself so well that you begin to know other people. A piece of us is in every person we can ever meet.

The greatest pleasure is not - say - sex or geometry. It is just understanding. And if you can get people to understand their own humanity - well, that's the job of the writer.

A person starts to live when he can live outside himself.

We know others to the extent that we know ourselves.

When my daughter looks at me, she sees a small old lady. That is because she sees only with her outside eyes. She has no chuming, no inside knowing of things. If she had chuming she would see a tiger lady. And she would have careful fear.

In many things it is not well to say, "Know thyself"; it is better to say, "Know others."

Love and concern for all are not things some of us are born with and others are not. Rather, they are results of what we do with our minds: We can choose to transform our minds so that they embody love, or we can allow them to develop habits and false concepts of separation.

No matter how hidden the cruelty, no matter how far off the screams of pain and terror, we live in one world. We are one people.

I was deeply interested in conveying what is a deeply felt conviction of my own. This is simply to suggest that human beings must involve themselves in the anguish of other human beings. This, I submit to you, is not a political thesis at all. It is simply an expression of what I would hope might be ultimately a simple humanity for humanity's sake.

In a world such as ours, where we have to cross the great divide of otherness or we will not survive, love is perhaps the most critical aspect that is there in our humanity, to both activate and to practice.

The mind knows only what lies near the heart.

If you can grow in love, you will grow in awareness. If you grow in awareness, you will grow in love.

Compassion means full immersion in the condition of being human.