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Happiness is a skill, emotional balance is a skill, compassion and altruism are skills, and like any skill they need to be developed. That's what education is about.

Matthieu Ricard

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Matthieu Ricard
Age: 78
Born: 1946
Born: February 15
Bhikkhu
Geneticist
Monk
Philosopher
Photographer
Translator
Writer
Needs
Developed
Like
Skills
Compassion
Balance
Emotional
Education
Happiness
Altruism
Need
Skill

More quotes by Matthieu Ricard

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If you don't have altruism, inner strength, inner peace, attention, then it's a trauma. It makes a difficult life for you and for others.
Matthieu Ricard
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We vastly underestimate the power of transformation of mind.
Matthieu Ricard
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Authentic happiness is not linked to an activity, it is a state of being.
Matthieu Ricard
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Happiness is the result of inner maturity. It depends on us alone, and requires patient work, carried out from day to day. Happiness must be built, and this requires time and effort. In the long term, happiness and unhappiness are therefore a way of being, or a life skill.
Matthieu Ricard
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Happiness is not the endless pursuit of pleasant experiences - that sounds more like a recipe for exhaustion - but a way of being that results from cultivating a benevolent mind, emotional balance, inner freedom, inner peace, and wisdom. Each of these qualities is a skill that can be enhanced through training the mind.
Matthieu Ricard
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You're not insensitive or indifferent, but you're also not vulnerable to the upheavals that cause emotional stress because you can buffer that... So that's the result of meditation you could call that emotional balance.
Matthieu Ricard
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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.
Matthieu Ricard
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We all have the ability to study the causes of suffering and gradually to free ourselves from them....it is not the magnitude of the task that matters, it's the magnitude of our courage.
Matthieu Ricard
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By breaking down our sense of self-importance, all we lose is a parasite that has long infected our minds. What we gain in return is freedom, openness of mind, spontaneity, simplicity, altruism: all qualities inherent in happiness.
Matthieu Ricard
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Empathy is the faculty to resonate with the feelings of others. When we meet someone who is joyful, we smile. When we witness someone in pain, we suffer in resonance with his or her suffering.
Matthieu Ricard
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Happiness is the main object of our aspirations, whatever name we give to it: fulfilment, deep satisfaction, serenity, accomplishment, wisdom, fortune, joy or inner peace, and however we try to seek it: creativity, justice, altruism, striving, completion of a plan or a piece of work.
Matthieu Ricard
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Mind training is based on the idea that two opposite mental factors cannot happen at the same time. You could go from love to hate. But you cannot, at the same time - toward the same object, the same person - want to harm and want to do good.
Matthieu Ricard
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The ultimate reason for meditating is to transform ourselves in order to be better able to transform the world or, to put it another way, to transform ourselves so we can become better human beings in order to serve others in a wiser and more efficient way. It gives your life the noblest possible meaning.
Matthieu Ricard
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Let us live simply in the freshness of the present moment, in the clarity of pure awakened mind.
Matthieu Ricard
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Peace is not weak. Standing up to a tank is harder than dropping a suicide bomb
Matthieu Ricard
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Various studies indicate that with age people gain more wisdom about life and are somehow happier than younger people. This is especially true if, as we age, we learn how to become more generous, altruistic, and peaceful.
Matthieu Ricard
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The goal of meditation is precisely to make your mind smooth and manageable so that it can be concentrated or relaxed at will and especially to free it from the tyranny of mental afflictions and confusion
Matthieu Ricard
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Placebos are like the lollipop of optimism, but we can do much better by dealing directly with the mind... And it works!
Matthieu Ricard
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I think if your direction in life is clear and if you develop the wish to accomplish/have a fulfilled life and to contribute something to others, I think that definitely gives you such a strength to want to be alive, that that would be the best placebo.
Matthieu Ricard
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Enlightenment is eliminating mental confusion, eliminating hatred, jealousy, mental toxins, cravings. That's very simple and straightforward. Whether you can do it or not is another matter.
Matthieu Ricard