Top 1281 Quotes & Sayings by Marianne Williamson - Page 21

The media establishment senses that the boats are coming and it has taken it upon itself to stand on those beaches and do everything it can to shoot the soldiers on the boats. They know the beaches will be taken.

For a society as abundant and as blessed as ours, to have as many disadvantaged children as we have does not bode well for our long-term economic future.

At midlife, you're pregnant with the best self you can be - someone who has learned enough from both successes and failures to add up to a fine human being.

The word "politics" comes from the Greek politeia which had to do with the citizenry, not the government.

Capitalism has been really good to me. I'm very fortunate: I have written books and my books have sold.

Anything having to do with what is happening inside people has political significance to me. That is why I like the term "holistic politics."

I do know middle age can bring greater depth, greater wisdom, greater capacity for love, greater capacity for relationship, greater consciousness and desire to serve and awareness of the fate of mankind - all these wonderful things, yes. And I know I'm getting there.

Once you see that everything in life is a gift, you see that food is also a gift. If you are about to eat chemically processed, unhealthy food, you realize that to do so is, on a certain level, an act of violence against yourself.

When you look at obesity in the United States, clearly it is not a bunch of stupid people. It has nothing to do with intelligence. Sometimes people who are dealing with issues of obesity and compulsive eating know more than I will ever know about nutrition, metabolism, and exercise, because they have studied it. But clearly the real problem, and therefore the real solution, is on another level of consciousness, and that is where the spiritual work comes in.

If I say to my daughter, "Go say `hi' to Aunt Gertrude," there is a reason there. I'm teaching her manners. I think the idea that she'll say `hi' to Aunt Gertrude only if she wants to is the biggest crock of silliness I've ever heard. Yet I meet people everyday who were clearly brought up to think that if they didn't want to say "hi" to Aunt Gertrude, that was fine.

In pursuing personal growth, there are issues where we can advance just so far by ourselves. At some point, our continued progress and improvement can only come about through relationships with others. Romantic love is an intense and intimate exposure to another person; if we can be who we want to be, even in that context, then our spiritual growth is exponentially expanded.

I surrender it to God, knowing that the pain itself is a product or a reflection of how I am interpreting whatever it is that is causing me pain. Some pain is simply the normal grief of human existence. That is pain that I try to make room for. I honor my grief. I try to be kinder to myself. I give myself time to move through and to process whatever is making me sad.

Our hearts are being stretched to span the violence and the suffering in our lives and world, and at the same time we are also witness to so much magnificence and brilliance. We are a species that has produced nuclear weapons, and also one that has developed profound insight into the nature of life itself.

I think there is a place where self-awareness becomes self-preoccupation if you don't take what you have discovered and bring it to bear on the conditions of the world.

Forgiveness is key to enchanted love because it is key to living right, period. It is the capacity to see beyond the veil of personality and worldly illusions. No one is perfect or attractive every day. Forgiveness means we are capable of relating to someone on a deeper level than the ordinary self. And that we are committed to doing so no matter what the appearances are, no matter what the situation is.

Only God’s thoughts, or love, is actually real. So when we separate ourselves from that love, we’re actually not thinking at all: we’re hallucinating.

The end does not justify the means. If we try to be someone we are not in order to achieve a result, then the result cannot help but be something other than what we intended.

The teenager begins to realize he or she really does want to be part of a community, really does want to have good relationships with others, really does want to create something truly good with his or her life. The teenager comes to understand just being smart and just being privileged are not enough.

We need to recognize that part our political problem is that we do not participate effectively, that we suffer from a kind of mental slumber.

Sometimes when everything has totally apart, the meaningless preoccupations that so often dominate our lives simply fall away. And what is left is who we really are, and who we really are is compassionate and intelligent and wise.

There is an increasingly pervasive sense that one age is over and a new one is beginning - in business, in politics, in science, in psychology.

I am trying to be in that alchemical soup of human transformation. I am trying to process, reconcile, forgive, let go, and grieve, when necessary.

I take very seriously this notion that my highest job is to live a better life, all the time and to the best of my ability. I need to monitor my own progress - take my own inventory - and clean my own closet. I am trying to do all that.

The more mature we are, the more receptive we are.

Life is a constant back-and-forth. We take a breath in and then we breathe out. The same is true for the culture as a whole.

I don't like the tendency on the part of so many people today to think that those who don't agree with them are bad. In fact, I find that very dangerous.

It takes mystical insight to see the beauty and innocence in each other, even when that is not what we are showing to the world. That is why God is needed in intimate relationships, to move us beyond the perceptions that can so often poison love.

The historian Arthur Schlesinger has pointed out that people tend to get interested in politics again every 30 years. The universe moves in cycles of three. The number figures in everything from Pythagoras's theory that the universe is based on three to the Father-the-Son-and-the-Holy- Ghost to the three-sided pyramidal shapes that intersect in the Jewish Star of David. The notion of the mystical three, metaphysically, spiritually, and even politically, is quite interesting to me.

I don't think that anything that anyone is doing today that is being pointed at as the "enemy" or "the problem" is as dangerous to our future as the fact that there are so many pointed fingers. The pointed finger is the enemy.

I had an experience that probably is shared by many parents. When my daughter was born, I felt viscerally connected to generations before and after me in a way that took me by surprise.

Calling something "new age" is one of the media's biggest canons. If you're called "new age," you couldn't possibly be serious, you couldn't possibly have anything deep to say, and you probably hang out in California too much - and we know that no one in California reads books or has any serious thoughts!

No matter what I write or speak about, it always has some connection to how our spiritual understanding impacts the world we live in. Whether I'm writing or teaching about nutrition, pilates, green living or meditation, all topics simmer down to self thought and intention.

I just want to write books or give talks which, if I were in the audience or I were the reader, I would appreciate.

It is absolutely a relationship with food that is a displaced relationship with God. And that displaced relationship with God takes two forms: our availability to other people and our availability to our own thoughts and feelings.

If we lose a job, we are easily tempted into thoughts like, "Ain't it awful? There aren't any jobs out there. This is terrible. It'll be awhile before the economy comes back. Even if they're hiring someone, they're not hiring someone my age with my resume." And that's really what causes the crash and burn. The fact is, there are Fortune 500 companies that have been founded during recessions.

People don't usually come see me because things are going well.

My father was a deeply committed humanitarian. He was a fighter for social justice. He was spirited in the deepest sense.

I feel that if your soul was branded by the sixties, you never lost the brand. It's like going into a nightclub and having your hand stamped so that you don't have to come back but you can come back.

The love is what's left at the end because it's the bedrock, fundamental reality that gets hidden all the time, but never really goes away.

Newtonian physics is over. You don't act on the world to change the world. You realize the world is a projection of your inner self. If you change, the world changes.

I've always wanted to have a radio show. It has been a dream of mine for a long time. With a radio show I can sit in a studio, or ultimately even sit in my own living room, and talk to hundreds of thousands of people.

The part of the brain that is watching the television and is on the computer at the same time, preparing to jump onto the treadmill for 15 minutes, might be able to lead into sex, but it would be hard put to lead us to romance, or to real authentic human connection.

I am very much into politics, but what interests me is sacred principles applied to that area. You know, many people are interested in alternative health who are never going to become doctors, or practitioners. That is how I am about politics. I am interested in the intersection of the Spiritual and the political - how spiritual principles apply to the social and political issues of our day. For me, the spiritual realm, is a more powerful place to speak from on those issues.

To me, everything happening inside of us is political.

If we had the government we deserved we would have the most righteous government, because we deserve the best - everybody does.

Any time we read a newspaper or take any look at the world around us, we are aware of the cruelty and violence that dominates our world.

I don't believe the United States is going through a midlife crisis. The United States is going through an adolescent crisis.

The transformation from body identification to spirit identification is the purpose of our lives.

When I was a child, my society lifted me up - though education primarily, as well as through other kinds of cultural stimulation. It wasn't just my parents or my religious community. The entire society lifted me up to the bottom rung of the ladder. Then they said, "Girl, it's up to you whether or not you climb." I don't have a problem with that. I think that is the best way to go about living.

If you are not grieving, you are not conscious. But if you are not rejoicing in the possibilities of how this could all change, then you are not looking through the filter of the greatest spiritual perspicacity.

We think that because we dwell inside our bodies that we are separate from other people who dwell inside theirs.

At the highest level of awareness, the greatest gift given and received when you give someone flowers, is the joy of living a life based on love.

If you allow your perceptions to be dominated by a status-quo perspective these thought forms create a network of status-quo mental habit patterns.

Our most meaningful conversations go on late at night when we're on the phone with our friends or talking to our lovers.

The work of intimacy, of course, is to learn to both show your own illumination, and to see it in a way that the physical eyes cannot reveal. In a way that only the heart can reveal: the illumined beauty in another person.

You have to make a space in your heart, in your mind and in your life itself for authentic human connection.

I’m haunted sometimes by the thought, what if we lived from that place all the time? What if we went there without tragedy striking first? The very thought of who we would be together, and the kinds of collectives decisions we would make...the kind of world we’d create ... makes me want to cry sometimes.

The secret of success is to realize that the crisis on our planet is much larger than just deciding what to do with your own life.

By the time something reaches the cover of Time magazine, it's old news anyway.

The world as it is perceived by most people, is a world of finite resources.