Metta Quotes

“Metta is the ability to embrace all parts of ourselves, as well as all parts of the world. Practicing metta illuminates our inner integrity because it relieves us of the need to deny different aspects of ourselves. We can open to everything with the healing force of love. When we feel love, our mind is expansive and open enough to include the entirety of life in full awareness, both its pleasures and its pains, we feel neither betrayed by pain or overcome by it, and thus we can contact that which is undamaged within us regardless of the situation. Metta sees truly that our integrity is inviolate, no matter what our life situation may be.”

“We can understand the inherent radiance & purity of our minds by understanding metta. Like the mind, metta is not distorted by what it encounters.”

“Contemplating the goodness within ourselves is a classical meditation, done to bring light, joy, and rapture to the mind. In contemporary times this practice might be considered rather embarrassing, because so often the emphasis is on all the unfortunate things we have done, all the disturbing mistakes we have made. Yet this classical reflection is not a way of increasing conceit. It is rather a commitment to our own happiness, seeing our happiness as the basis for intimacy with all of life. It fills us with joy and love for ourselves and a great deal of self-respect. Significantly, when we do metta practice, we begin by directing metta toward ourselves. This is the essential foundation for being able to offer genuine love to others”

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

“To reteach a thing its loveliness is the nature of metta. Through lovingkindness, everyone & everything can flower again from within.”

“Buddha first taught metta meditation as an antidote: as a way of surmounting terrible fear when it arises.”

“Communist until you get rich. Feminist until you get married. Atheist until the airplane starts falling.”

“Like water poured from one vessel to another, metta flows freely, taking the shape of each situation without changing its essence.”

“Attachment is conditional, offers love only to certain people in certain ways; it is exclusive. Love, in the sense of metta, used by Buddha, is a universal, nondiscriminating feeling of caring and connectedness.”

“Metta sees truly that our integrity is inviolate, no matter what our life situation may be. We do not need to fear anything. We are whole: our deepest happiness is intrinsic to the nature of our minds, and it is not damaged through uncertainty and change.”