Quote

I've spent my life cultivating knowledge of myself. But the more I know myself, the more utterly mysterious I become.

Sam Keen

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Sam Keen
Age: 54
Author
Philosopher
Writer
Cultivating
Utterly
Mysterious
Spent
Knowledge
Become
Life

More quotes by Sam Keen

Image
The first part of the spiritual journey should properly be called psychological rather than spiritual because it involves peeling away the myths and illusions that have misinformed us.
Sam Keen
Image
The more you become a connoisseur of gratitude, the less you are a victim of resentment, depression, and despair.
Sam Keen
Image
To love is to return to a home we never left, to remember who we are.
Sam Keen
Image
I think we have to trust ourselves in the darkness of not knowing. The God out of which we came and into which we go is an unknown God. It's the luminosity of that darkness and that unknowing that is, I think, the most human - and the most sacred - place of all.
Sam Keen
Image
Mystical experiences (unlike scientific conclusions) cannot be communicated from one person to another. Philosophers and little children are continually amazed that we, unaccountably, find ourselves in a somewhat intelligible world.
Sam Keen
Image
The sacred is discovered in what moves and touches us, in what makes us tremble.
Sam Keen
Image
What shapes our lives are the questions we ask, refuse to ask, or never think to ask.
Sam Keen
Image
Enter each day with the expectation that the happenings of the day may contain a clandestine message addressed to you personally. Expect omens, epiphanies, casual blessings and teachers who unknowingly speak to your condition.
Sam Keen
Image
Our society has been eaten up by the economic view of things, which routinely forces us to work at jobs that don't mean anything.
Sam Keen
Image
The telling of your stories is a revolutionary act.
Sam Keen
Image
I think we're inevitably going to be depressed when we focus the major part of our energy and attention on something that doesn't give us meaning, only material things.
Sam Keen
Image
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.
Sam Keen
Image
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.
Sam Keen
Image
Our minds, bodies, feelings, relationships are all informed by our questions. What you ask is who you are. What you find depends on what you search for. And what shapes our lives are the questions we ask, refuse to ask, or never think of asking.
Sam Keen
Image
If some incarnation of evil as unambiguous as Hitler appeared again, I would have no moral qualms about killing the enemy. But in the modern world of moral murkiness, I prefer to keep my hands as clean of enemy blood as possible.
Sam Keen
Image
Paranoia reduces anxiety and guilt by transferring to the other all the characteristics one does not want to recognize in oneself. It is maintained by selective perception and recall. We only see and acknowledge those negative aspects of the enemy that support the stereotype we have already created.
Sam Keen
Image
Down to earth advice about the path that leads away from the kingdom of the hollow men.
Sam Keen
Image
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.
Sam Keen
Image
Neurotic identity crises come when our defense mechanisms have been too successful and we're encapsulated in the fortress we have constructed with nothing to refresh us in our solitary confinement. So we play the old movies with their stale fears and their unrealistic hopes until we become bored enough to risk disarmament and engagement.
Sam Keen
Image
Freud articulated the standard opinion when he asked with supposed seriousness, 'What does a woman want?'... Today the question that is the yeast in the social dough is, 'What do men want?
Sam Keen