Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Trust what moves you most deeply.
Deep summer is when laziness finds respectability.
The telling of your stories is a revolutionary act.
We can only choose whether we will feel and not what we will feel.
You can know what's in your life when you know what's in your heart.
To love is to return to a home we never left, to remember who we are.
We learn to fly not by being fearless, but by the daily practice of courage.
To be on a quest is nothing more or less than to become an asker of questions.
I fall into all kinds of inauthenticity when I conspire to forget my mortality.
The deepest mystery comes not when we don't know somebody well, but when we do.
The sacred is discovered in what moves and touches us, in what makes us tremble.
What shapes our lives are the questions we ask, refuse to ask, or never think to ask.
Down to earth advice about the path that leads away from the kingdom of the hollow men.
The sense of gratitude produces true spiritual alchemy, makes us magnanimous - large souled.
To really love a person completely is to come to a point where your stories are intertwined.
There has always been a part of me that saw wilderness and risk-taking as the path to freedom.
You don't go through a deep personal transformation without some kind of dark night of the soul.
What happens if I try to build a life dedicated to avoiding all danger and all unnecessary risk?
The best practice is to follow the advice posted on every railroad crossing: Stop. Look. Listen.
I think it's increasingly hard to have deep self-knowledge without entering the darkness in some way.
We come to love not by finding a perfect person but by learning to see an imperfect person perfectly.
We come to love not by finding the perfect person, but by learning to see an imperfect person perfectly.
We now realize that we're not living in a piecemeal world, but a world where everything is linked together.
The more you become a connoisseur of gratitude, the less you are a victim of resentment, depression, and despair.
When you genuinely lose your illusions, you begin to marvel at things, because you don't have the answers any more.
I've spent my life cultivating knowledge of myself. But the more I know myself, the more utterly mysterious I become.
You come to love not by discovering the ideal individual, yet by figuring out how to see a blemished individual flawlessly.
Mounting an expedition to actualize a Compassionate Commonwealth of all peoples...is the great spiritual challenge of our time.
Our society has been eaten up by the economic view of things, which routinely forces us to work at jobs that don't mean anything.
In the degree that we remember and retell our stories and create new ones we become the authors, the authorities, of our own lives.
I try to steer away from high metaphysical belief because I think we humans do best when we realize that we don't know all that much.
If we had a better understanding of the ways we think about enemies, we might be able to think of more rational ways of settling conflict.
The more we chase away the false mysteries - those things we think we know about ourselves and others - the more mysterious our existence becomes.
Throughout my life, I've had different metaphors for freedom. At one time, it was skin diving. In the ocean you feel weightless; you escape from gravity.
To sustain love, a man and a woman must continually be marrying and divorcing, moving with, against, away from, and beyond each other, saying 'yes' and 'no'.
I think we're inevitably going to be depressed when we focus the major part of our energy and attention on something that doesn't give us meaning, only material things.
I think that critiquing the myths of our society and helping people find their way through them is a very important thing. It's a theme that goes through all of my work.
The 'still, small voice' of God never calls on me to be like another man. It appeals to me to rise to my full stature and fulfill the promise that sleeps within my being.
We [people] may enjoy this fleeting beauty [of life] for such a brief instance. And then we are compost. G - , the creator-destroyer, certainly has a strange sense of humor!
There is the extreme of hopelessness and the inevitability of doom, a deep despair that comes from the sense that our industrial, consuming society is jeopardizing the planet.
If we don't preserve forest habitat for spotted owls, then soon we won't have trees to refresh the air we breathe. And we're realizing that this applies to social ecology, as well.
I think there are families that are very kind and supportive of people's ability to change. People who come from such families may go through life without dipping into the dark night.
The first part of the spiritual journey should properly be called psychological rather than spiritual because it involves peeling away the myths and illusions that have misinformed us.
We suffer from the illusion that the faster we run, the more likely we are to grasp happiness. The truth is that the velocity necessary for success rarely exceeds the rate of reflection.
Freud articulated the standard opinion when he asked with supposed seriousness, 'What does a woman want?'... Today the question that is the yeast in the social dough is, 'What do men want?
Compassion begins with the acknowledgment of the single inescapable truth that is the foundation for the possibility of love between human beings - an awareness of the tragic sense of life.
Human beings are what I think of as "biomythic" animals: we're controlled largely by the stories we tell. When we get the story wrong, we get out of harmony with the rest of the natural order.
There are two questions a man must ask himself: The first is 'Where am I going?' and the second is 'Who will go with me?' If you ever get these questions in the wrong order you are in trouble.
The abyss beyond our beliefs is something we have to pass through in order to see the world anew, to see it in terms not dictated so much by our culture, our parents, or our religious convictions.
A man must go on a quest / to discover the sacred fire / in the sanctuary of his own belly / to ignite the flame in his heart / to fuel the blaze in the hearth / to rekindle his ardor for the earth