Rick Hanson > Quotes

“Nurturing your own development isn’t selfish. It’s actually a great gift to other people.”
― Rick Hanson, Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom

“The remedy is not to suppress negative experiences; when they happen, they happen. Rather, it is to foster positive experiences—and in particular, to take them in so they become a permanent part of you.”
― Rick Hanson, Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom

“All joy in this world comes from wanting others to be happy, and all suffering in this world comes from wanting only oneself to be happy. —Shantideva”
― Rick Hanson, Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom

“Only we humans worry about the future, regret the past, and blame ourselves for the present.”
― Rick Hanson, Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom

“It’s easy to be kind when others treat you well. The challenge is to preserve your loving-kindness when they treat you badly—to preserve goodwill in the face of ill will.”
― Rick Hanson, Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom

“Neurons that fire together wire together. Mental states become neural traits. Day after day, your mind is building your brain. This is what scientists call experience-dependent neuroplasticity,”
― Rick Hanson, Hardwiring Happiness: The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm, and Confidence

“By taking just a few extra seconds to stay with a positive experience—even the comfort in a single breath—you’ll help turn a passing mental state into lasting neural structure.”
― Rick Hanson, Hardwiring Happiness: The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm, and Confidence

“If you take care of the minutes, the years will take care of themselves.”
― Rick Hanson, Hardwiring Happiness: The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm, and Confidence

“Imagine a day in which you feel generally fine. After waking up, you spend a few minutes in bed lightly thinking ahead about some of the people you will see and the things you will do. You hit traffic on the way to work, but you don’t fight it; you just listen to the radio and don’t let the other drivers bother you. You may not be excited about your job, but today you’re focusing on the sense of accomplishment you feel as you complete each task. On the way home, your partner calls and asks you to stop at the store; it’s not your favorite thing to do after work, but you remind yourself it’s just fifteen extra minutes. In the evening, you look forward to a TV show and you enjoy watching it. Now let’s look at the same day, but imagine approaching it in a different way. After waking up, you spend a few minutes in bed pessimistically anticipating the day ahead and thinking about how boring work will be. Today, the traffic really gets under your skin, and when a car cuts you off, you get angry and honk your horn. You’re still rankled by the incident when you start work, and to make matters worse, you have an unbelievable number of rote tasks to get through. By the time you’re driving home, you feel fried and don’t want to do a single extra thing. Your partner calls to ask you to stop at the store. You feel put upon but don’t say anything and go to the store. Then you spend much of the evening quietly seething that you do all the work around the house. Your favorite show is on, but it’s hard to enjoy watching it, you feel so tired and irritated. Over these two imaginary days, the same exact things happened. All that was different was how your brain dealt with them—the setting that it used.”
― Rick Hanson, Hardwiring Happiness: The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm, and Confidence

“Your brain is like Velcro for negative experiences but Teflon for positive ones.”
― Rick Hanson, Hardwiring Happiness: The Practical Science of Reshaping Your Brain—and Your Life

“[I]f you can be with the pleasant without chasing after it, with the unpleasant without resisting it, and with the neutral without ignoring it - [...] that is an incredible [...] freedom.”
― Rick Hanson, Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom

“How about making a personal commitment never to go to sleep without having meditated that day, even if for just one minute?”
― Rick Hanson, Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom

“Taking in the good is not about putting a happy shiny face on everything, nor is it about turning away from the hard things in life. It's about nourishing well-being, contentment, and peace inside that are refuges you can always come from and return to.”
― Rick Hanson, Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom

“Every time you take in the good, you build a little bit of neural structure. Doing this a few times a day—for months and even years—will gradually change your brain, and how you feel and act, in far-reaching ways.”
― Rick Hanson, Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom

“First darts are unpleasant to be sure. But then we add our reactions to them. These reactions are “second darts”—the ones we throw ourselves. Most of our suffering comes from second darts.”
― Rick Hanson, Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom

“There is a saying in Tibet: “If you take care of the minutes, the years will take care of themselves.” What’s the most important minute in life? I think it’s the next one. There is nothing we can do about the past, and we have limited influence over the hours and days to come. But the next minute—minute after minute after minute—is always full of possibility.”
― Rick Hanson, Resilient: How to Grow an Unshakable Core of Calm, Strength, and Happiness

“Resentment is when I take poison and wait for you to die.”
― Rick Hanson, Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom

“If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each [person’s] life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm any hostility. —Henry Wadsworth Longfellow”
― Rick Hanson, Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom

“It’s a remarkable fact that the people who have gone the very deepest into the mind—the sages and saints of every religious tradition—all say essentially the same thing: your fundamental nature is pure, conscious, peaceful, radiant, loving, and wise, and it is joined in mysterious ways with the ultimate underpinnings of reality, by whatever name we give That.”
― Rick Hanson, Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom

“staying with a negative experience past the point that’s useful is like running laps in Hell: You dig the track a little deeper in your brain each time you go around it.”
― Rick Hanson, Hardwiring Happiness: The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm, and Confidence

“Whatever positive facts you find, bring a mindful awareness to them—open up to them and let them affect you. It’s like sitting down to a banquet: don’t just look at it—dig in!”
― Rick Hanson, Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom

“It's impossible to change the past or the present: you can only accept all that as it is.”
― Rick Hanson, Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom

“•  To survive and pass on their genes, our ancestors needed to be especially aware of dangers, losses, and conflicts. Consequently, the brain evolved a negativity bias that looks for bad news, reacts intensely to it, and quickly stores the experience in neural structure. We can still be happy, but this bias creates an ongoing vulnerability to stress, anxiety, disappointment, and hurt.”
― Rick Hanson, Hardwiring Happiness: The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm, and Confidence

“Stage one—you’re caught in a second-dart reaction and don’t even realize it: your partner forgets to bring milk home and you complain angrily without seeing that your reaction is over the top. Stage two—you realize you’ve been hijacked by greed or hatred (in the broadest sense), but cannot help yourself: internally you’re squirming, but you can’t stop grumbling bitterly about the milk. Stage three—some aspect of the reaction arises, but you don’t act it out: you feel irritated but remind yourself that your partner does a lot for you already and getting cranky will just make things worse. Stage four—the reaction doesn’t even come up, and sometimes you forget you ever had the issue: you understand that there’s no milk, and you calmly figure out what to do now with your partner. In education, these are known succinctly as unconscious incompetence, conscious incompetence, conscious competence, and unconscious competence. They’re useful”
― Rick Hanson, Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom

“Love and hate: they live and tumble together in every heart, like wolf cubs tussling in a cave. There is no killing the wolf of hate; the aversion in such an attempt would actually create what you’re trying to destroy. But you can watch that wolf carefully, keep it tethered, and limit its alarm, righteousness, grievances, resentments, contempt, and prejudice. Meanwhile, keep nourishing and encouraging the wolf of love.”
― Rick Hanson, Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom

“Just before bed, your mind is very receptive, so no matter what went wrong that day, find something that went right, open to it, and let good feelings come and ease you into sleep. Doing”
― Rick Hanson, Hardwiring Happiness: The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm, and Confidence

“staying with a negative experience past the point that’s useful is like running laps in Hell: You dig the track a little deeper in your brain each time”
― Rick Hanson, Hardwiring Happiness: The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm, and Confidence

“you can manage your mind in three primary ways: let be, let go, let in.”
― Rick Hanson, Hardwiring Happiness: The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm, and Confidence

“See the collateral damage—the suffering—that results when you cling to your desires and opinions or take things personally. Over the long haul, most of what we argue about with others really doesn’t matter that much.”
― Rick Hanson, Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom

“Even if you, like me, have done things worthy of remorse, they do not wipe out your good qualities; you are still a fundamentally good person.”
― Rick Hanson, Hardwiring Happiness: The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm, and Confidence