A Quote by Chris Hedges

In war, we always deform ourselves, our essence.

Chris Hedges

Quote Topics

Always Essence Our Ourselves War

Quote Author

Chris Hedges
American - Journalist

As we watch the world embrace the Olympics in the coming days, let us remember why the modern Olympics came into being: to bring nations closer together, to have the youth of the world compete in sports, rather than fight in war. As long as we believe our own war-driven thoughts, there will always be war, in ourselves, in our families, and in our world. As long as we believe our thoughts, there will always be war.

Byron Katie

We are always running, and it has become a habit. We struggle all the time, even during our sleep. We are at war with ourselves, and we can easily start a war with others.

Nhat Hanh

But how can we love someone if we don't like him? Easy-we do it to ourselves all the time. We don't always have tender, comfortable feelings about ourselves; sometimes we feel foolish, stupid, asinine, or wicked. But we always love ourselves: we always seek our own good. Indeed, we feel dislike toward ourselves, we berate ourselves, precisely because we love ourselves; because we care about our good, we are impatient with our bad.

Peter Kreeft

And when we look in through the windows, all we see are shadows. And when we try and listen, all we hear is a whispering. And we cannot understand the whispering, because our minds have been invaded by a war. A war that we have both won and lost. The very worst sort of war. A war that captures dreams and re-dreams them. A war that has made us adore our conquerors and despise ourselves.

Arundhati Roy

We are in a war of a peculiar nature. It is not with an ordinary community, which is hostile or friendly as passion or as interest may veer about: not with a state which makes war through wantonness, and abandons it through lassitude. We are at war with a system, which by its essence, is inimical to all other governments, and which makes peace or war, as peace and war may best contribute to their subversion. It is with an armed doctrine that we are at war. It has, by its essence, a faction of opinion, and of interest, and of enthusiasm, in every country.

Edmund Burke

In our charade with ourselves we pretend that our war is not really war. We have changed the name of the War Department to the Defense Department and call a whole class of nuclear missiles Peace Keepers!

Jack Kornfield

That is the essence and mission of 'rebel buddha': to free us from the illusions we create by ourselves, about ourselves, and from those that masquerade as reality in our cultural and religious institutions.

Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche

I was born just after the end of World War II, and with my friends in our little suburban backyards in New Jersey, we used to play war a lot. I don't know if boys still play war, they probably do, but we were thrusting ourselves into recent history and we were always fighting either the Nazis or the Japanese.

Paul Auster

If we are at war with our parents, our family, our society, or our church, there is probably a war going on inside us also, so the most basic work for peace is to return to ourselves and create harmony among the elements within us - our feelings, our perceptions, and our mental states. That is why the practice of meditation, looking deeply, is so important.

Nhat Hanh

The larger loneliness of our lives evolves from our unwillingness to spend ourselves, stir ourselves. We are always damping down our inner weather, permitting ourselves the comforts of postponement, of rehearsals

Carol Shields

Most of us are at war with ourselves, are our own worst enemies. We expect a great deal of ourselves, yet we do not put ourselves in a condition to achieve great things. We are either too indulgent to our bodies, or we are not indulgent enough.

Orison Swett Marden

Let us simmer over our incalculable cauldron, our enthralling confusion, our hotchpotch of impulses, our perpetual miracle - for the soul throws up wonders every second. Movement and change are the essence of our being; rigidity is death; conformity is death; let us say what comes into our heads, repeat ourselves, contradict ourselves, fling out the wildest nonsense, and follow the most fantastic fancies without caring what the world does or thinks or says. For nothing matters except life.

Virginia Woolf

If we don't know ourselves, our essence, where our true power comes from, we will believe our power comes from collecting victories, trophies, money, or recognition. And these are all fine, but it's not ultimately what life is about. When we think it is, we really waste our greatest possibilities.

Arianna Huffington

We're in essence allowing our spirit to come to terms with all the conflicts that we build within ourselves. Disease is after all a conflict within the tissue itself. Memory fading within the tissue, conflict of our actions or thoughts, our lives are not seamlessly running together in some way for ourselves, and had not been for a long time before we get to the critical point of a disease.

Maya Tiwari

I abominate war as Unchristian. I hold it the greatest of human crimes. I deem it to involve all others,--violence, blood, rapine, fraud; everything that can deform the character, alter the nature, and debase the name of man.