Matthieu Ricard Quotes

Happiness and suffering are states of mind, and so their main causes cannot be found outside the mind.

It is the mind that maketh good or ill, That maketh wretch or happy, rich or poor.

Man is only miserable so far as he thinks himself so.

Nothing is miserable unless you think it is so.

A man's as miserable as he thinks he is.

Happiness is an abstraction, it is a product of the imagination, it is a way of being moved, which depends entirely on our way of seeing and feeling.

Nothing is miserable but what is thought so, and contrariwise, every estate is happy if he that bears it be content.

What is without us has no connection with happiness, only so far as the preservation of our lives and health depends upon it. . . . Happiness springs immediately from the mind.

No man can enjoy happiness without thinking that he enjoys it.

The quality of your life is determined by how you feel at any given moment.How you feel is determined by how you interpret what is happening around you,not by the the events themselves.

A letter is a risky thing; the writer gambles on the reader's frame of mind.

When you're reading something, your imagination goes and you see it in your mind. Sometimes my instincts with that are right, and sometimes they're wrong.

People bring to what they see and feel, the inner weather of their souls and complexion of their minds.

Pain and pleasure occur in consciousness and exist only there

A person can make himself happy, or miserable, regardless of what is actually happening 'outside,' just by changing the contents of consciousness.

All our interior world is reality, and that, perhaps, more so than our apparent world.

These patients have turned away from outer reality; it is for this reason that they are more aware than we of inner reality and can reveal to us things which without them would remain impenetrable.

There is a basin in the mind where words float around on thought and thought on sound and sight. Then there is a depth of thought untouched by words, and deeper still a gulf of formless feelings untouched by thought.

Present sufferings seem far greater to men than those they merely dread.

Happiness is not something that happens ... It does not depend on outside events, but, rather, on how we interpret them.

What we feel is not based on our experience, but on our INTERPRETATION of experiences.

If you don't mind being unhappy, what happens to the unhappiness?

What I meant was, you looked happier in the pictures.

Unless you feed your mind, those suffering states will take over.