Matthieu Ricard: Human

Matthieu Ricard is French writer and Buddhist monk. Explore interesting quotes on human.
Matthieu Ricard: 18   quotes 1   like

“We must distinguish between spirituality in general terms, which aims to make us better people, and religion. Adopting a religion remains optional, but becoming a better human being is essential.”

Matthieu Ricard

The Quantum and the Lotus, translated by Ian Monk (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2001), p. 264 https://books.google.it/books?id=F-QpZMJ6b7QC&pg=PA264.

People , Religion

“Working to spare animals the immense suffering they undergo does not diminish by one iota my determination to alleviate human misery. Needless suffering must be done away with wherever it is, in whatever form it takes. This is a war that has to be waged on all fronts, and it can be.”

Matthieu Ricard

Source: A Plea for the Animals (2014), Chapter 5, p. 99

War , Suffering , Animals

“Benevolence is not a commodity that needs to be distributed sparingly like cake or chocolate. It is away of being, an attitude, an intention to do good for those who enter our sphere of attention and the wish to alleviate their suffering. Loving animals also does not mean loving humans less. In fact, by also loving animals we love people better, because our benevolence is then vaster and therefore of better quality. Someone who loves only a selection of sentient beings, even of humanity, is the possessor of only fragmentary and impoverished benevolence.”

Matthieu Ricard

Source: A Plea for the Animals (2014), Chapter 5, p. 98

Love , People , Suffering , Animals

“The most striking quality that humans and animals have in common is the capacity to experience suffering. Why do we still blind ourselves, now at the beginning of the twenty-first century, to the immeasurable suffering that we inflict on animals, knowing that a great part of the pain that we cause them is neither necessary nor unavoidable? Certainly we should know that there is no moral justification for inflicting needless pain and death on any being.”

Matthieu Ricard

Introduction, p. 4
A Plea for the Animals (2014)

Death , Pain , Suffering , Animals

“Kindness, altruistic love, and compassion are qualities that do not harmonize well with bias. Restricting the field of our compassion not only diminishes it quantitatively but also qualitatively. Applying our compassion only to certain beings, human beings in this case, makes it a lesser and a poorer thing.”

Matthieu Ricard

Source: A Plea for the Animals (2014), Chapter 1, p. 39

Love