Quotes About Acceptance

Shadow work is humiliating work, but properly so. If you do not eat such humiliations with regularity and make friends with … all those who reveal to you and convict you of your own denied faults…, you will certainly remain in the first half of life forever.

Going somewhere good means having to go through and with the bad, and being unable to hold ourselves above it or apart from it.

In this negative frame, the quickest ticket to heaven, enlightenment, or salvation is "unworthiness" itself, or at least a willingness to face our own smallness and incapacity.

Up to now, we have not been carrying history too well, because "there stood among us one we did not recognize," "one who came after me, because he existed before me" (John 1:26, 30). He came in mid-tone skin, from the underclass, a male body with a female soul, from an often hated religion, and living on the very cusp between East and West. No one owns him, and no one ever will.

God, however, forgives even immature religion, and those who know God learn to do the same.

God's love is perfectly free. It is not coerced by any of our good actions, nor can we lose it because of our bad actions. We are stuck with it and cannot increase-or decrease-God's love for us by anything we do or don't do.

The point is that, in some ways, many humans can identify with Mary more than they can with Jesus precisely because she was not God, but the archetype for our yes to God!

All great spirituality is somehow about letting go.

Faith is simply to trust the real, and to trust that God is found within it—even before we change it. This is perhaps our major stumbling stone

The joyful acceptance of a limited world, of which I am only a small moment and limited part—this is probably the clearest indication of a man in his fullness.

The great commandment is not thou shalt be right. The great commandment is to be in love.

The more that we can put together, the more that we can "forgive" and allow, the more we can include and enjoy, the more we tend to be living in the Spirit.

but I do believe that the only way out of deep sadness is to go with it and through it.

Jesus touched and healed anybody who desired it and asked for it, and there were no other prerequisites for his healings.

It takes uncommon humility to carry both the dark and the light side of things. The only true perfection available to humans is the honest acceptance of our imperfection.

Owning our story and loving ourselves through that process is the bravest thing that we will ever do.

They are comfortable knowing, and they are comfortable not knowing. They can care and not care—without guilt or shame. They can act without success because they have named their fear of failure. They do not need to affirm or deny, judge or ignore. But they are free to do all of them with impunity. A saint is invincible.

Be still and wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing. —T.S. ELIOT, "East Coker" from the Four Quartets

True religion is always a deep intuition that we are already participating in something very good, in spite of our best efforts to deny it or avoid it.

So many of us accept either a successful or a negative self-image inside of a system of false images to begin with!

The wounds to our ego are our teachers and must be welcomed. They must be paid attention to, not litigated.

So long as we all cling to our prejudices and identify with our preconceived views and feelings, genuine human community is impossible. You have to get to the point where you can break free from your feelings. Otherwise in the end you won't have any feelings; they'll have you.

Anne Wilson Schaef

It's possible to overlook character flaws of in-laws for the simple reason that you feel neither responsible for them nor genetically implicated.