Matthieu Ricard Quotes

We have known about the placebo effect for many years. This is a remarkable effect - placebo can cure 30 percent in many cases.

You can't be at the same time a spiritual master and someone who is always angry. It doesn't work.

I was born in France. My father was a renowned French philosopher and journalist, and my mother was a painter. So I grew up in Parisian intellectual circles.

Too much involvement with one's feeling [is destructive]. If they have too much self-centered feelings, they get in trouble.

You get [something] in your body that is the suffering or the problem, and then you [add] a second one, which is worry. In both cases, [it is] pointless.

Just be free, and at least you will go through adversity with a stronger mind, and therefore, you'll be less affected, and pain will affect you less.

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.

If there is a remedy or a cure, a solution to a problem or difficulty, why worry?

Changing your attitude has a curative effect... Maybe you can go directly to a change of mind, a change of attitude.

We vastly underestimate the power of transformation of mind.

In a way, there's nothing wrong with playing the piano, but it's not a huge trauma if you don't.

The most striking quality that humans and animals have in common is the capacity to experience suffering.

Neuroscience has proven that similar areas of the brain are activated both in the person who suffers and in the one who feels empathy. Thus, empathic suffering is a true experience of suffering.