Sam Keen
We come to love not by finding a perfect person but by learning to see an imperfect person perfectly.Collection: Love
A society in which vocation and job are separated for most people gradually creates an economy that is often devoid of spirit, one that frequently fills our pocketbooks at the cost of emptying our souls.Collection: Society
We come to love not by finding the perfect person, but by learning to see an imperfect person perfectly.Collection: Love
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.Collection: Men
To love is to return to a home we never left, to remember who we are.Collection: Cute
The more you become a connoisseur of gratitude, the less you are a victim of resentment, depression, and despair. Gratitude will act as an elixir that will gradually dissolve the hard shell of your ego-your need to posses and control-and transform you into a generous being. The sense of gratitude produces true spiritual alchemy, makes us magnanimous-lar ge souled.Collection: Spiritual
The best practice is to follow the advice posted on every railroad crossing: Stop. Look. Listen.Collection: Best Practices
Trust what moves you most deeply.Collection: Moving
You don't go through a deep personal transformation without some kind of dark night of the soul.Collection: Dark
The spiritual journey is one that we must take "alone together," in the same way that a good marriage involves a dance between solitude and communion. The life of the spirit entails a continuous alternation between retreating into oneself and going out into the world: it's an inward-outward journey. There is a solitary part to it, but that solitude helps us to develop richer and more in-depth relationships with our friends, our children, our community, and the political world.Collection: Spiritual
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.Collection: Spiritual
The root of humanly caused evil is not man's animal nature, not territorial aggression, or innate selfishness, but our need to gain self-esteem, deny our mortality, and achieve a heroic self-image. Our desire for the best is the cause of the worst.Collection: Self Esteem
The more you become a connoisseur of gratitude, the less you are a victim of resentment, depression, and despair.Collection: Gratitude
Enter each day with the expectation that the happenings of the day may contain a clandestine message addressed to you personally. Expect omens, epiphanies, casual blessings and teachers who unknowingly speak to your condition.Collection: Teacher
The sacred is discovered in what moves and touches us, in what makes us tremble.Collection: Moving
When you genuinely lose your illusions, you begin to marvel at things, because you don't have the answers any more.Collection: Answers
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.Collection: Sleep
What shapes our lives are the questions we ask, refuse to ask, or never think to ask.Collection: Thinking
Our minds, bodies, feelings, relationships are all informed by our questions. What you ask is who you are. What you find depends on what you search for. And what shapes our lives are the questions we ask, refuse to ask, or never think of asking.Collection: Thinking
I suspect that we are all recipients of cosmic love notes. Messages, omens, voices, cries, revelations, and appeals are homogenized into each day's events. If only we knew how to listen, to read the signs.Collection: Voice
Soul grows in communion. Word by word, story by story, for better or worse, we build our world. From true conversation - speaking and listening - communication deepens into compassion and creates community.Collection: Communication
The sense of gratitude produces true spiritual alchemy, makes us magnanimous - large souled.Collection: Spiritual
We can only choose whether we will feel and not what we will feel.Collection: Feels
The telling of your stories is a revolutionary act.Collection: Stories
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.Collection: Animal
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.Collection: Love Is
We learn to fly not by being fearless, but by the daily practice of courage.Collection: Practice
Good men and good women have fire in the belly. We are fierce. Don't mess with us if you're looking for someone who will always be 'nice' to you. Nice gets you a C+ in life. We don't always smile, talk in a soft voice, or engage in indiscriminate hugs. In the loving struggle between the sexes we thrust and parry.Collection: Sex
Every time I come across a rattlesnake on my farm I initially react in fear and am tempted to kill it. Then I realize I wouldn't want to live in a world where all wild things - without and within - are domesticated.Collection: World
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.Collection: Thinking
Being pretty successful, I can, of course, afford some luxuries. But I realize again and again how we have to disillusion ourselves of the idea that these things are going to give us real satisfaction.Collection: Real
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?Collection: Men
If some incarnation of evil as unambiguous as Hitler appeared again, I would have no moral qualms about killing the enemy. But in the modern world of moral murkiness, I prefer to keep my hands as clean of enemy blood as possible.Collection: Blood
Down to earth advice about the path that leads away from the kingdom of the hollow men.Collection: Men
There is no easy formula for determining right and wrong livelihood, but it is essential to keep the question alive. To return the sense of dignity and honor to manhood, we have to stop pretending that we can make a living at something that is trivial or destructive and still have sense of legitimate self-worth. A society in which vocation and job are separated for most people gradually creates an economy that is often devoid of spirit, one that frequently fills our pocketbooks at the cost of emptying our souls.Collection: Jobs
The major impediment to experiencing the sacred depths of ordinary moments is the speed and distraction of contemporary life that moves to the imperatives of the global economic order.In addition, we increasingly live in a virtual world in which our reality is filtered through media and information technology.Collection: Moving
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!Collection: People
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.Collection: Air
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.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Ocean
The more we chase away the false mysteries - those things we think we know about ourselves and others - the more mysterious our existence becomes.Collection: Thinking
If we come from good families where we have been supported well, there is a disillusionment we have to undergo in terms of the culture's values. We have to get beyond our cultural mythology to find out who we are.Collection: Culture
Mystical experiences (unlike scientific conclusions) cannot be communicated from one person to another. Philosophers and little children are continually amazed that we, unaccountably, find ourselves in a somewhat intelligible world.Collection: Children
Burnout is nature's way of telling you, you've been going through the motions your soul has departed; you're a zombie, a member of the walking dead, a sleepwalker. False optimism is like administrating stimulants to an exhausted nervous system.Collection: Optimism
Chronological time is what we measure by clocks and calendars; it is always linear, orderly, quantifiable, and mechanical. Kairotic time is organic, rhythmic, bodily, leisurely, and aperiodic; it is the inner cadence that brings fruit to ripeness, a woman to childbirth, a man to change the direction of his life.Collection: Men
On the pilgrim's path each man must become Moses, going on a vision quest to some mountaintop and returning with the ten or twenty commandments that he holds sacred. So long as we obey or break the rules that have been set up for us by the Giants - Parents and other Authorities - we remain good or bad children. Growing into the fullness of our humanity means that we become co-authors of the rules by which we will agree to have our lives judged.Collection: Children
The lover heals the world not by a vague and abstract love for everybody and everything, but by becoming passionate and vowing fidelity to concrete relationships, persons, institutions, and places.Collection: Love
To be on a quest is nothing more or less than to become an asker of questions.Collection: Travel
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.Collection: Religious
It's interesting that the worse things get, the more we believe the next technological fix is going to get us out of it. But it's like being in quicksand: the more you struggle the deeper you sink.Collection: Believe