Sam Keen Quotes

We learn to fly not by being fearless, but by the daily practice of courage.

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.

Trust what moves you most deeply.

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.

To love is to return to a home we never left, to remember who we are.

You come to love not by discovering the ideal individual, yet by figuring out how to see a blemished individual flawlessly.

We come to love not by finding the perfect person, but by learning to see an imperfect person perfectly.

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.

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.

You don’t go through a deep personal transformation without some kind of dark night of the soul.

Deep summer is when laziness finds respectability.

I think it’s increasingly hard to have deep self-knowledge without entering the darkness in some way.

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.

The more you become a connoisseur of gratitude, the less you are a victim of resentment, depression, and despair.

The best practice is to follow the advice posted on every railroad crossing: Stop. Look. Listen.

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.

We come to love not by finding a perfect person but by learning to see an imperfect person perfectly.

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.

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.

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.