Sam Keen Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
More Sam Keen quote about:
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“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.”
-- Sam Keen -
“We come to love not by finding the perfect person, but by learning to see an imperfect person perfectly.”
-- Sam Keen -
“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.”
-- Sam Keen -
“To love is to return to a home we never left, to remember who we are.”
-- Sam Keen -
“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.”
-- Sam Keen -
“Consensual paranoia - the pathology of the normal person who is a member of a war-justifying society - forms the template from which all the images of the enemy are created. By studying the logic of paranoia, we can see why certain archetypes of the enemy must necessarily recur, no matter what the historical circumstances.”
-- Sam Keen -
“To be on a quest is nothing more or less than to become an asker of questions.”
-- Sam Keen -
“The sacred is discovered in what moves and touches us, in what makes us tremble.”
-- Sam Keen -
“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.”
-- Sam Keen -
“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.”
-- Sam Keen -
“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.”
-- Sam Keen -
“Call it "womb awe" or even "womb worship" but it's not simple envy. I don't remember even wanting to be a woman. But each of the three times I have been present at the birth of one of my children, I have been overwhelmed by a sense of reverence... It was quite suddenly, the first day of creation; the Goddess giving birth to a world... Like men since the beginning of time I wondered: What can I ever create that will equal the magnificence of this new life?”
-- Sam Keen -
“Neurotic identity crises come when our defense mechanisms have been too successful and we're encapsulated in the fortress we have constructed with nothing to refresh us in our solitary confinement. So we play the old movies with their stale fears and their unrealistic hopes until we become bored enough to risk disarmament and engagement.”
-- Sam Keen -
“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.”
-- Sam Keen -
“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.”
-- Sam Keen -
“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.”
-- Sam Keen -
“What shapes our lives are the questions we ask, refuse to ask, or never think to ask.”
-- Sam Keen -
“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.”
-- Sam Keen -
“In the degree that we remember and retell our stories and create new ones we become the authors, the authorities, of our own lives.”
-- Sam Keen -
“As a mode of perception that often becomes a style of life, paranoia weaves around the vulnerable self or group an air-tight metaphysic and world view. Paranoia is an antireligious mysticism based on the feeling or perception that the world in general, and others in particular, are against me or us. Reality is perceived as hostile. By contrast, the religious mystic experiences the ground of being as basically friendly to the deepest needs of the self. That which is unknown, strange, or beyond our comprehension is with and for rather than against us.”
-- Sam Keen -
“The more you become a connoisseur of gratitude, the less you are a victim of resentment, depression, and despair.”
-- Sam Keen -
“We can only choose whether we will feel and not what we will feel.”
-- Sam Keen -
“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.”
-- Sam Keen -
“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.”
-- Sam Keen -
“What happens if I try to build a life dedicated to avoiding all danger and all unnecessary risk?”
-- Sam Keen -
“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.”
-- Sam Keen -
“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.”
-- Sam Keen -
“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.”
-- Sam Keen -
“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.”
-- Sam Keen
