Quotes from Sam Keen

Freedom is an inside job.

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

We can only choose whether we will feel and not what we will feel.

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.

Chronological time is what we measure by clocks and calendars; it is always linear, orderly, quantifiable, and mechanical. Kairotic time is organic, rhythmic, bodily, leisurely, and aperiodic; it is the inner cadence that brings fruit to ripeness, a woman to childbirth, a man to change the direction of his life.

Each day befriend a single fear, and the miscellaneous terrors of being human will never join together to form such a morass of vague anxiety that it rules your life from the shadows of the unconscious. We learn to fly not by being fearless, but by the daily practice of courage.

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.

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'.

To cultivate love, or whole-soul-fulness, we must resist the temptation to be upwardly mobile, to be always on the move, to pull up our roots and fly to the mythic kingdom of Elsewhere.

In a pluralistic culture . . . every individual must create a private mythological system. I must discover within myself the Garden of Eden from which I am exiled and the New Jeruselem toward which I am journeying. And must bear the burden of being my own redeemer, my own Christ.

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

A society in which vocation and job are separated for most people gradually creates an economy that is often devoid of spirit, one that frequently fills our pocketbooks at the cost of emptying our souls.

Whoever authors your story authorizes your actions.

A man who does not know how to wage a just battle, first with himself and then with others, has no values worth defending, no ideals worth aspiring to, no awareness of the disease of which he might be healed. And no mensch worships the status quo.

Without knowing how to calculate the odds on such matters, it seems improbably to me that God would have whispered the meaning of my life into the ear of some guru or authority.

Condition a man (or a woman) to value aggression above all other virtues, and you will produce a character type whose most readily expressed emotion will be anger. Condition a woman (or a man) to value submission above all other attitudes and you will produce a character type whose most readily expressed emotion will be sadness.

In problems of logic, contradictory statements cannot be true; in the psyche, only contradictions are true. Self-image and shadow are Siamese twins, and the psyche is equally formed by the conscious and unconscious. Whatever appears to be true on the surface is linked to an opposite truth beneath the surface. What you see is not what you get.

The question that surrounds lovemaking is, "Did you cum?" and the unasked question beneath that is, "Am I all right?

You come to love not by finding the perfect person, but by seeing an imperfect person perfectly---Sam Keen, Author

The world is run largely by urban, sedentary males. The symbol of power is the chair.

The larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder. —RALPH SOCKMAN

Condition a woman (or a man) to value submission above all other attitudes and you will produce a character type whose most readily expressed emotion will be sadness.

quanto mais você se tornar um conhecedor da gratidão, menos você será vítima do ressentimento, da depressão e do desespero. A gratidão funcionará como um elixir que gradualmente dissolverá a concha dura de seu ego - sua necessidade de possuir e controlar - e transformará você num ser generoso. O senso de gratidão produz uma verdadeira alquimia espiritual, torna-nos magnânimos - de almas grandes.

If the only prayer you said in your whole life was "thank you," that would be sufficient. —MEISTER ECKHART