Stephen Mitchell famous quotes

07-08-2025

What we are tempted to call a disaster is sometimes the first, painful stage of a blessing.
-- Stephen Mitchell

#Blessing #Firsts #Sometimes
When speech comes from a quiet heart, it has the strength of the orchid, and the fragrance of rock.
-- Stephen Mitchell

#Heart #Orchids #Rocks
Education is no longer thought of as a preparation for adult life, but as a continuing process of growth and development from birth until death.
-- Stephen Mitchell

#Education #Growth #Preparation
There are two kinds of women: those who marry princes and those who marry frogs. The frogs never become princes, but it is an acknowledged fact that a prince may very well, in the course of an ordinary marrige, gradually, at first almost imperceptibly, turn into a frog. Happy the woman who after twenty-five years still wakes up beside the prince she fell in love with.
-- Stephen Mitchell

#Years #Two #Wake Up
The physical body is acknowledged as dust, the personal drama as delusion. It is as if the world we perceive through our senses, the whole gorgeous and terrible pageant, were the breath-thin surface of a bubble, and everything else, inside and outside, is pure radiance. Both suffering and joy come then like a brief reflection, and death like a pin.
-- Stephen Mitchell

#Drama #Reflection #Dust
When there's no way out, you just follow the way in front of you.
-- Stephen Mitchell

#Way
So actions themselves are not good and not bad; only the intention is important.
-- Stephen Mitchell

#Important #Action #Intention
In a cookie factory, different cookies are baked in the shape of animals, cars, people, and airplanes. They all have different names and forms, but they are all made from the same dough, and they all taste the same.
-- Stephen Mitchell

#Airplane #Animal #Names
If you listen to the traffic with a clear mind, without any concepts, it is not noisy, it is only what it is.
-- Stephen Mitchell

#Mind #Traffic #Clear
True mastery can be gained by letting things go their own way.
-- Stephen Mitchell

#Way #Mastery #Letting Things Go
Whatever thought grips the mind at the time of death is the one which will propel it and decide for it the nature of its future birth. Thus if one wants to attain god after death, one has to think of him steadfastly... This is not as simple as it sounds, for at the time of death the mind automatically flies to the thought of an object (i.e. money, love) which has possessed it during its sojourn in the world. Thus one must think of god constantly.
-- Stephen Mitchell

#Simple #Thinking #Mind
Happily ever after doesn't begin with Once upon a time: it begins with Now.
-- Stephen Mitchell

#Once Upon A Time #Ever After #Happily Ever After
But self-abasement is just inverted egoism. Anyone who acts with genuine humility will be as far from humiliation as from arrogance.
-- Stephen Mitchell

#Humility #Self #Arrogance
Love softens everything except our sense of integrity.
-- Stephen Mitchell

#Integrity
Children understand that 'once upon a time' refers not only--not even primarily--to the past, but to the impalpable regions of the present, the deeper places inside us where princes and dragons, wizards and talking birds, impassable roads, impossible tasks, and happy endings have always existed, alive and bursting with psychic power.
-- Stephen Mitchell

#Children #Past #Dragons
What may appear to be proud ungrateful and headstrong fron the outside may from the inside express an unshakable integrity of character. Pride, if it doesn't step over the line into arrogance, is simply an unprejudiced self-esteem. Ingratitude is the appropriate response to a kindness that has hooks on it. Headstrong is another word for trusting your own heart.
-- Stephen Mitchell

#Kindness #Self Esteem #Integrity
Creativity, not normality, has become the paradigm of mental health.
-- Stephen Mitchell

#Creativity #Mental Health #Paradigm

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