Matthieu Ricard Quotes

Happiness can be achieved through training the mind.

When we practice metta, we open continuously to the truth of our actual experience, changing our relationship to life.

Meditation practice is simply moving from a life of hurting myself and others to a life of not hurting myself and others.

Meditation trains the mind the way physical exercise strengthens the body.

Anyone can be happy by simply training their brain.

I hope I will be a calm mother; I do yoga and I meditate, and those should help.

We come to meditation to learn how not to act out the habitual tendencies we generally live by - those actions that create suffering for ourselves and others, and get us into so much trouble.

If somebody pisses me off and I understand it ain't personal then I'll go to another place and I'll meditate.

What you learn about pain in formal meditation can help you relate to it in your daily life.

If anything interferes with my inner peace, I will walk away. Arguments with family members. All that stuff. None of it matters.

At the end of the day, I can end up just totally wacky, because I've made mountains out of molehills. With meditation, I can keep them as molehills.

You don't meditate once and suddenly your life turns around. What it does is it lets you train your brain to be able to become more stable in an action-oriented way.

My father was a complex man - expansive and uncontainable, volatile and aggressive. He was also the one who introduced me to yoga. He practiced daily, and I would sometimes practice alongside him. His example inspired me.

Yogis have human emotions, but the thing is not to let anger and doubt become an obsession.

Understand that thoughts are thoughts. If they are unreasonable, reason with them, even if you have no reason left. You are the observer of your mind, not its victim.

My whole teaching consists of two words, meditation and love.

Thoughts come and go. It's impossible to stop your thoughts, but the idea is that the thoughts are kind of like waves on the ocean. That's Jon Kabat-Zinn's big analogy and that this is actually kind of diving under the waves. And you know it's kind of interesting.

There are three kinds of violence: one, through our deeds; two, through our words; and three, through our thoughts. …The root of all violence is in the world of thoughts, and that is why training the mind is so important.

Emotions like guilt and shame cut you off from web of existence and that causes inflammation in the body. I would recommend that you go to a level of awareness where you can be an observer of your thoughts and emotions and use mindfulness.

It is only when we begin to relax with ourselves that meditation becomes a transformative process. Only when we relate with ourselves without moralizing, without harshness, without deception, can we let go of harmful patterns. Without maitri (metta), renunciation of old habits becomes abusive. This is an important point.

Training our mind through meditation does not mean forcibly subjugating it or beating it into shape.

Meditation is simply about being yourself and knowing something about who that is. It is about coming to realize that you are on a path whether you like it or not, namely, the path that is your life. Meditation may help us see that this path we call our life has direction; that it is always unfolding, moment by moment; and that what happens now, in this moment, influences what happens next.

We underestimate the value of patience. It is possible that people might sometimes interrupt our meditation sessions or Dharma study, but they can never take away our opportunity to train in inner virtues such as patience. It is this mental training, rather than outer virtuous activities, that is the essence of Dharma practice.

Meditation is a flower and compassion is its fragrance.

In our consciousness, there are many negative seeds and also many positive seeds. The practice is to avoid watering the negative seeds, and to identify and water the positive seeds every day.