Real Love Quotes

“Forgiveness is a personal process that doesn’t depend on us having direct contact with the people who have hurt us.”
― Sharon Salzberg, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection

“The key in letting go is practice. Each time we let go, we disentangle ourselves from our expectations and begin to experience things as they are.”
― Sharon Salzberg, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection

“We’re capable of much more than mediocrity, much more than merely getting by in this world.”
― Sharon Salzberg, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection

“Our ability to connect with others is innate, wired into our nervous systems, and we need connection as much as we need physical nourishment.”
― Sharon Salzberg, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection

“Once we are honest about our feelings, we can invite ourselves to consider alternative modes of viewing our pain and can see that releasing our grip on anger and resentment can actually be an act of self-compassion.”
― Sharon Salzberg, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection

“When we don’t tell those we love about what’s really going on or listen carefully to what they have to say, we tend to fill in the blanks with stories.”
― Sharon Salzberg, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection

“If we truly loved ourselves, we’d never harm another. That is a truly revolutionary, celebratory mode of self-care.”
― Sharon Salzberg, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection

“If we turn away from our own pain, we may find ourselves projecting this aversion onto others, seeing them as somehow inadequate for being in a troubled situation.”
― Sharon Salzberg, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection

“Self-compassion is like a muscle. The more we practice flexing it, especially when life doesn’t go exactly according to plan (a frequent scenario for most of us), the stronger and more resilient our compassion muscle becomes.”
― Sharon Salzberg, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection

“Trying to impose our personal agenda on someone else’s experience is the shadow side of love, while real love recognizes that life unfolds at its own pace.”
― Sharon Salzberg, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection

“Even when we do our very best to treat those close to us with utmost respect and understanding, conflict happens. That’s life. That’s human nature.”
― Sharon Salzberg, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection

“Meditation can be a refuge, but it is not a practice in which real life is ever excluded. The strength of mindfulness is that it enables us to hold difficult thoughts and feelings in a different way—with awareness, balance, and love”
― Sharon Salzberg, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection

“For any marginalized group to change the story that society tells about them takes courage and perseverance.”
― Sharon Salzberg, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection

“With mindfulness, loving kindness, and self-compassion, we can begin to let go of our expectations about how life and those we love should be.”
― Sharon Salzberg, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection

“Just as a prism refracts light differently when you change its angle, each experience of love illuminates love in new ways, drawing from an infinite palette of patterns and hues.”
― Sharon Salzberg, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection

“You are a person worthy of love. You don’t have to do anything to prove that.”
― Sharon Salzberg, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection

“We cannot simply forgive and forget, nor should we.”
― Sharon Salzberg, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection

“Mindfulness won’t ensure you’ll win an argument with your sister. Mindfulness won’t enable you to bypass your feelings of anger or hurt either. But it may help you see the conflict in a new way, one that allows you to break through old patterns.”
― Sharon Salzberg, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection

“Letting go is an inside job, something only we can do for ourselves.”
― Sharon Salzberg, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection

“Only when we start to distinguish reality from fantasy that we can humbly, with eyes wide open, forge loving and sustainable connections with others.”
― Sharon Salzberg, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection

“Smiling at someone can have significant health consequences.”
― Sharon Salzberg, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection

“When we learn to respond to disappointments with acceptance, we give ourselves the space to realize that all our experiences—good and bad alike—are opportunities to learn and grow.”
― Sharon Salzberg, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection

“When you recognize and reflect on even one good thing about yourself, you are building a bridge to a place of kindness and caring.”
― Sharon Salzberg, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection

“Cultivating loving kindness for ourselves is the foundation of real love for our friends and family, for new people we encounter in our daily lives, for all beings and for life itself.”
― Sharon Salzberg, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection

“This is why clinging to our ideas of perfection isolates us from life and is a barrier to real love for ourselves. Perfection is a brittle state that generates a lot of anxiety, because achieving and maintaining unwavering standards—whether they’re internal or external—means we’re always under threat. We become focused on avoiding failure, and love for the self cannot be a refuge because it has become too conditional, too dependent on performance. As Oscar Wilde said in his play An Ideal Husband, “It is not the perfect, but the imperfect, who have need of love.” And that means every last one of us.”
― Sharon Salzberg, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection

“Kindness is really at the core of what it means to be and feel alive.”
― Sharon Salzberg, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection

“With a clear intention and a willing spirit, sooner or later we experience the joy and freedom that arises when we recognize our common humanity with others and see that real love excludes no one.”
― Sharon Salzberg, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection

“It is awareness of both our shared pain and our longing for happiness that links us to other people and helps us to turn toward them with compassion.”
― Sharon Salzberg, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection

“The combination of realizing our distinctiveness along with our unity is seeing interdependence.”
― Sharon Salzberg, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection

“Forgiveness can be bittersweet. It contains the sweetness of the release of a story that has caused us pain, but also the poignant reminder that even our dearest relationships change over the course of a lifetime.”
― Sharon Salzberg, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection