Quotes About Wisdom

If you do not acquire good training in detachment, you may attach to all the wrong things.

Being informed is different from being formed, and the first is a common substitute for the second.

Self-help courses will only help you if they teach you to pay attention to life itself.

True masters deconstruct as well as reconstruct.

A master drives you toward the substance so that you will stop defending and protecting the forms.

The game is over once we see clearly because evil succeeds only by disguising itself as good, necessary, or helpful.

If we try to change our ego with the help of our ego, we only have a better-disguised ego!

It's true all the time everywhere or it's not true! And that one truth is always Mystery.

Carl Jung, in his Collected Works (8, 784): "We cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life's morning; for what was great in the morning will be of little importance in the evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie.

To know the Lord and his ways," as the Jewish prophets put it,250 has very little to do with intelligence and very much to do with a wonderful mixture of confidence and surrender. People who live in this way tend to be the calmest and happiest people I know. They draw their life from the inside out.

What is a normal goal to a young person becomes a neurotic hindrance in old age. —CARL JUNG No wise person ever wanted to be younger. —NATIVE AMERICAN APHORISM

Do not get rid of your hurts until you have learned all that they have to teach you.

Death is largely a threat to those who have not yet lived their life. Odysseus has lived the journeys of both halves of life, and is ready to freely and finally let go.

I would wonder if you could be a hero or heroine if you did not live in deep time, that is, Past, present, and future all at once.

One cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life's morning; for what was great in the morning will be of little importance in the evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie. —CARL JUNG, THE STRUCTURE AND DYNAMICS OF THE PSYCHE As

Those who are not true leaders or elders will just affirm people at their own immature level, and of course immature people will love them and elect them for being equally immature

The two alternatives are always exclusionary, usually in an angry way: things are either totally right or totally wrong, with me or against me, male or female, Democrat or Republican, Christian or pagan, on and on and on. The binary mind provides quick security and false comfort, but never wisdom. It thinks it is smart because it counters your idea with an opposing idea. There is usually not much room for a "reconciling third." I see this in myself almost every day.

Final authority in the spiritual world does not tend to come from any kind of agenda success but from some kind of suffering. Insecurity and impermanence are the best spiritual teachers.

Responding to John the Baptist's hard-line approach, Jesus maintains both sides of this equation when he says, "No man born of woman is greater than John the Baptizer, yet the least who enters the kingdom of heaven is greater than he is" (Matthew 11:11). Is that double-talk? No, it is second-half-of-life talk.

I believe that there are two necessary paths enabling us to move toward wisdom: a radical journey inward and a radical journey outward. For

Before transformation, sin is any kind of moral mistake; afterward, sin is a mistake about who you are and whose you are.

The Dalai Lama said much the same thing: "Learn and obey the rules very well, so you will know how to break them properly.

Thomas Merton, the American monk, pointed out that we may spend our whole life climbing the ladder of success, only to find when we get to the top that our ladder is leaning against the wrong wall. Most

light is not so much what you directly see as that by which you see everything else.