George Saunders Quotes

Compassionate action emerges from the sense of openness, connectedness, and discernment you have created.

Compassion brings us to a stop, and for a moment we rise above ourselves.

Cultivating a generous spirit starts with mindfulness. Mindfulness, simply stated, means paying attention to what is actually happening; it's about what is really going on.

Good character consists of recognizing the selfishness that inheres in each of us and trying to balance it against the altruism to which we should all aspire. It is a difficult balance to strike, but no definition of goodness can be complete without it.

Wisdom ceases to be wisdom when it becomes too proud to weep, too grave to laugh, and too selfish to seek other than itself.

We cannot let another person into our hearts or minds unless we empty ourselves. We can truly listen to him or truly hear her only out of emptiness.

Compassion is the key to living outside the confines of your lower self.

Selfishness is weakness. But loving and caring for others is a position of power beyond anything we can possibly imagine.

In contrast to the path of selfishness, there is no room for road rage on the straight and narrow way.

When I was in grade school and we had to write papers about what we wanted to be when we grew up, I wanted to be a social worker or a missionary or a teacher... Then I got involved with tennis, and everything was just me, me, me. I was totally selfish and thought about myself and nobody else, because if you let up for one minute, someone was going to come along and beat you. I really wouldn't let anyone or any slice of happiness enter... I didn't like the characteristics that it took to become a champion.

To me a man of meditation is bound to be immensely loving.

We like to pretend that our generous impulses come naturally. But the reality is we often become our kindest, most ethical selves only by seeing what it feels like to be a selfish jackass first. It's the reason... we have to get burned before we understand the power of fire; the reason our most meaningful relationships are so often those that continued beyond the very juncture at which they came the closest to ending.

Just try to keep the heart turned outward, as well as having moments inward. I think the threat of an industry like this is that you can become sort of self-obsessed. There's so much praise being given to you - there's a real threat of exalting the ego.

Unless we're completely awake, have a degree of that. We tense against love and hold on in a way that doesn't let it flow. When that's really strong, the key piece to freeing our hearts is self-compassion.

Two Rules for Happy Living: 1. Be able to experience anything. 2. Cause only those things which others are able to experience easily.

I don't think too much about the future. Not because I'm hiding my head in the sand but because I figured out that whatever the future was going to be, the thing I had to do was to quiet my mind and open my heart and do what I could to end suffering.

Many people are unhappy and are not experiencing life to its fullest because they’ve closed their hearts to compassion, they are motivated by only what they want and what they think they need. They rarely do anything for anybody else unless they have an ulterior goal in mind. They are self-involved and self-centered.

Alas,we who wanted kindness, could not be kind ourselves.

When we are motivated by compassion and wisdom, the results of our actions benefit everyone, not just our individual selves or some immediate convenience. When we are able to recognize and forgive ignorant actions of the past, we gain strength to constructively solve the problems of the present.

pity me that the heart is slow to learn what the swift mind beholds at every turn.

My understanding of kindness is that we are hoping to be truly beneficial in every situation, and that this desire means a whole suite of things: being nicer, sure, but also being more aware, more present, more articulate, more fearless, less habituated, etc., etc. And sometimes even being firm, or having an edge, or even being angry.

The heart should be cultivated with more assiduity than the head.

At the heart of the message of the Savior of the world is a single, glorious, wonderful, still largely untried concept. In its simplest terms the message is that we should seek to overcome the selfishness we all seem to be born with, that we should overcome human nature and think of others before self.

According to me, your life is going to be a gradual process of becoming kinder and more loving. Hurry up. Speed it along. Start right now.

I don't believe I'm selfish in any way.