Sam Keen Quotes

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.

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

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

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.

Trust what moves you most deeply.

Down to earth advice about the path that leads away from the kingdom of the hollow men.

The sacred is discovered in what moves and touches us, in what makes us tremble.

To be on a quest is nothing more or less than to become an asker of questions.

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

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.

What shapes our lives are the questions we ask, refuse to ask, or never think to ask.

I fall into all kinds of inauthenticity when I conspire to forget my mortality.

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

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 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.

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!

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.

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

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.

I've spent my life cultivating knowledge of myself. But the more I know myself, the more utterly mysterious I become.

Mounting an expedition to actualize a Compassionate Commonwealth of all peoples...is the great spiritual challenge of our time.

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?

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.

The sense of gratitude produces true spiritual alchemy, makes us magnanimous - large souled.

The telling of your stories is a revolutionary act.

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

To really love a person completely is to come to a point where your stories are intertwined.

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.

When you genuinely lose your illusions, you begin to marvel at things, because you don't have the answers any more.

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

The more we chase away the false mysteries - those things we think we know about ourselves and others - the more mysterious our existence becomes.

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.

What happens if I try to build a life dedicated to avoiding all danger and all unnecessary risk?

There has always been a part of me that saw wilderness and risk-taking as the path to freedom.

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.

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.

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.

We now realize that we're not living in a piecemeal world, but a world where everything is linked together.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The deepest mystery comes not when we don't know somebody well, but when we do.

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.

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