Top 78 Quotes & Sayings by Rob Brezsny

You have to learn how to stay in a good mood as you overthrow the sour, puckered hallucination that is mistakenly referred to as reality.

The "Kumulipo" is an old Hawaiian prayer chant that poetically describes the creation of the world. The word literally means "beginning-in-deep-darkness." Here darkness doesn't connote gloom and evil. Rather, it's about the inscrutability of the embryonic state; the obscure chaos that reigns before germination.

We need radical curiosity and reverent pranks, voracious listening and ferocious thanks.

The revolution begins at home. If you overthrow yourself again and again, you might earn the right to help overthrow the rest of us.

May you eat an unfamiliar dessert in a strange land at least once every three years. May you wake up... and start dancing while you're still half-asleep. May you spray-paint Rilke poems as graffiti on highway overpasses... My you learn to identify by name 20 flowers, 15 trees, 10 clouds, and one extrasolar planet... May you dream of taking a trip to the moon in a gondola powered by firecrackers and wild swans.

HYPOTHESES: Evil is boring. Cynicism is idiotic. Fear is a bad habit. Despair is lazy. Joy is fascinating. Love is an act of heroic genius. Pleasure is our birthright. Receptivity is a superpower.

Break open the forbidden happiness.

Can you imagine what it would feel like to become aware of an omnipresent ocean of wild divine love that has always been a secret to you in the same way that the sea is invisible to a fish?

Love enmeshes you in your partner's unique set of karmic complications, so make sure you're very interested in his or her problems. Love is a laboratory where you can uncover secrets about yourself that have previously been hidden, so be ravenously curious.

Will you have the stamina and inspiration necessary to dream up bigger, better, more original sins and wilder, wetter, more interesting problems? Do you realize how demanding it will be to turn yourself into a wildly disciplined, radically curious, fiercely tender, ironically sincere, ingeniously loving, aggressively sensitive, blasphemously reverent, lustfully compassionate master of rowdy bliss?

Please take good care of it all, OK? Be an enlightened monarch who treats your domain with reverent responsibility. And make sure you also enjoy the full measure of fun that comes with such mastery. Glide through life as if all of creation is yearning to honor and entertain you.

Act as if the universe is a prodigious miracle created for your amusement and illumination. Assume that secret helpers are working behind the scenes to assist you in turning into the gorgeous masterpiece you were born to be. Join the conspiracy to shower all of creation with blessings.

A common obstruction to a vital intimate relationship is what I call the assumption of clairvoyance. You imagine, perhaps unconsciously, that your partner or friend is somehow magically psychic when it comes to you -\-\ so much so that he or she should unfailingly intuit exactly what you need, even if you don't ask for it. This fantasy may seem romantic, but it can undermine the most promising alliances. To counteract any tendencies you might have to indulge in the assumption of clairvoyance, practice stating your desires aloud.

Mojo grace means the shocking benevolence of a mysterious force beyond our comprehension.

Your imagination is the single most important asset you possess. Your imagination is your power to create mental pictures of things that don't exist yet and that you want to bring into being. Your imagination is what you use to shape your future. And so in your own way, you are a prophet. You generate countless predictions every day. Your imagination is the source,tirelessly churning out mental pictures of what you'll be doing in the future.

If you bury your face in your tear-stained pillow and beg God to please send you your soul mate, may you not slur your words in such a way that they sound like "cell mate."

You're hungry for the infinite and the infinite is hungry for you.

Only you can prevent the genocide of the imagination.

We're searching for the answers so we can destroy them and dream up better questions.

Life always delivers the creative energy you need to change into the new thing you must become.

Any media-brainwashed automaton can summon the insipid courage to peer into the horrifying abyss. But it takes a freaking genius with a fearless imagination to peer into the maw of happiness.

Your drive to produce hard-edged opinions stoked by hostility is likely a sign that you've been brainwashed by the pedestrian influences of pop nihilism.

Pronoia is the antidote for paranoia. It's the understanding that the universe is fundamentally friendly. It's a mode of training your senses and intellect so you're able to perceive the fact that life always gives you exactly what you need, exactly when you need it.

Here's what I say: We will ignore the cult of doom and gloom and embrace the cause of zoom and boom. We will laugh at the stupidity of evil and hate, and summon the brilliance of praise and create. . . Life is crazily in love with us-wildly and innocently in love with us. The universe always gives us exactly what we need, exactly when we need it.

Life is a conspiracy to shower you with a nonstop feast of interesting experiences, all of which are designed to help you grow your intelligence, shed your pretensions, and master the art of ingenious love.

The world is crazily in love with you, wildly and innocently in love. Even now, thousands of secret helpers are conspiring to turn you into the beautiful curiosity you were born to be.

Your holiest pain comes from your yearning to change yourself in the exact way you'd like the world around you to change.... Your sweet spot is in between the true believers and the scoffing skeptics.

Somewhere there's a treasure that has no value to anyone but you, and a secret that's meaningless to everyone except you, and a frontier that harbors a revelation only you would know how to exploit. Why not go in search of those things?

Assume that your drive to experience pleasure isn't a barrier to your spiritual growth, but is in fact essential to it. Proceed on the hypothesis that cultivating joy can make you a more ethical and compassionate person. Imagine that feeling good has something important to teach you every day. What might you do differently from what you do now?

BIBLIOBLISS. Transported into states of transcendent pleasure while immersed in reading a favorite book.

Real confidence has no bluster or bombast. It's not rooted in a desire to seem better than everyone else and it's not driven by a fear of appearing weak. Real confidence settles in when you have a clear vision of exactly what you need to do. Real confidence blooms as you wield the skills and power you have built through your hard work and discipline.

Proclaim the only truth you can be totally sure of: "I don't know."

The poet Muriel Rukeyser said the universe is composed of stories, not of atoms. The physicist Werner Heisenberg declared that the universe is made of music, not of matter. And we believe that if you habitually expose yourself to toxic stories and music, you could wind up living in the wrong universe, where it's impossible to become the gorgeous genius you were born to be. That's why we implore you to nourish yourself with delicious, nutritious tales and tunes that inspire you to exercise your willpower for your highest good.

In the New World, you'll kick your own ass and I'll wash my own brain. I'll be my own parents and you'll be you own wife. And vise versa. That'll be normal in the New World - different from the Old World, where everyone except me is to blame for my ignorance and you call on everyone except yourself to give you what you need. I'll push my own buttons and right my own wrongs. You'll wake yourself up and sing your won songs.

Love isn't as simple as you wish it would be. On the other hand, it's nowhere near as complicated as you fear it is. My advice to you is to extinguish any itch you might have to compel love to serve any agenda whatsoever. Instead, bow down before it with all the innocence you can muster, and declare yourself ready to be its humble student and servant. Celebrate through surrender.

Remember your natural affection for all of creation.

The average American child sees 20,000 murders in TV before reaching age 18. This is considered normal. Every community has video rental stores filled with multimillion-dollar films that depict people doing terrible things to each other. If you read newspapers, you have every right to believe that Bad Nasty Things compose 90 percent of the human experience. But you will be hard-pressed to find more than a few novels, films, news stories, and TV shows that dare to depict life as a gift whose purpose is to enrich the human soul.

Not waiting for someone to give you what you can give yourself.

On you and me and everything, I bestow my ripe blessings and boisterous bliss.

Don't save your enormous creativity for "something better." Give it to this.

But you will be hard-pressed to find more than a few novels, films, news stories, and TV shows that dare to depict life as a gift whose purpose is to enrich the human soul.

The 11th Commandment: Thou Shalt Not Bore God. The 12th Commandment: Thou Shalt Not Bore Thyself.

All of creation is alive and conscious, and all of creation deserves our burning, churning, yearning love. All of it. Not just the people and creatures and things that we personally find beautiful and helpful and interesting. But everything. All of creation.

Factual information alone isn't sufficient to guide you through life's labyrinthine tests. You need and deserve regular deliveries of uncanny revelation. One of your inalienable rights as a human being should therefore be to receive a mysteriously useful omen every day of your life.

Push hard to get better, become smarter, grow your devotion to the truth, fuel your commitment to beauty, refine your emotional intelligence, hone your dreams, negotiate with your shadow, cure your ignorance, shed your pettiness, heighten your drive to look for the best in people, and soften your heart -- even as you always accept yourself for exactly who you are with all of your so-called imperfections.

Do you realize you can actually listen a person's soul into existence? Your fervent interest in the inner life of those you care for can awaken their dormant powers. The teacher Richard Moss says 'The greatest gift you can give another is the purity of your attention.' Offer this gift.

You're a star -- and so am I. I'm a genius -- and so are you. Your success encourages my brilliance, and my charisma enhances your power. Your victory doesn't require my defeat, and vice versa.

May you eat an unfamiliar dessert in a strange land at least once every three years.

Enjoy saying "no!" but don't make it the wellspring of your vitality. Be fueled by blood-red yeses.

Anthropologists say that in every culture in history, children have played the game hide and seek.

I'm allergic to dogma. I thrive on riddles. Any idea I believe, I reserve the right to disbelieve as well.

You will have a growing knack for gravitating toward wilder, wetter, more interesting problems. More and more, you will be drawn to the kind of gain that doesn't requite pain. You'll be so alive and awake that you'll cheerfully push yourself out of your comfort zone in the direction of your personal frontier well before you're forced to do so by divine kicks in the ass.

Being born on the earth is the highest honor and greatest privilege. To be alive as human beings gives us the chance to pull off exquisite and Herculean feats of magic that are not possible in nirvana or heaven or any other so-called paradise, higher dimension, or better place,being alive right now is the greatest gift i got from God.

All of us need to be in touch with a mysterious, tantalizing source of inspiration that teases our sense of wonder and goads us on to life’s next adventure.

The fisherman of the Colombian coast must be learned doctors of ethics and morality, for they invented the word sentipensante, or ‘feeling-thinking’ to define language that speaks the truth. Eduardo Galeano

It's about time you admitted that you are a miraculous work of art. You came into this world as a radiant bundle of exuberant riddles. You slipped into this dimension as a shimmering burst of spiral hallelujahs. You blasted into this realm as a lush explosion of ecstatic gratitude. And it is your birthright to fulfill those promises.

Somewhere in the world there is a person who could ask you the precise question you need to hear in order to catalyze the next phase of your evolution. Do what's necessary to run into that person.

You're alive because of love. You're made of love.

In its wild state, the truth is fluid, slippery, vagrant, scrambled, promiscuous, kaleidoscopic, and beautiful.

Obsessing on evil is boring. Rousing fear is a hackneyed shtick. Wallowing is despair is a bad habit. Indulging in cynicism is akin to committing a copycat crime.