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Being pretty successful, I can, of course, afford some luxuries. But I realize again and again how we have to disillusion ourselves of the idea that these things are going to give us real satisfaction.

Sam Keen

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Sam Keen
Age: 55
Author
Philosopher
Writer
Things
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Luxuries
Successful
Afford
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Luxury
Give
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Disillusion

More quotes by Sam Keen

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There are two questions a man must ask himself: The first is 'Where am I going?' and the second is 'Who will go with me?' If you ever get these questions in the wrong order you are in trouble.
Sam Keen
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Human beings are what I think of as biomythic animals: we're controlled largely by the stories we tell. When we get the story wrong, we get out of harmony with the rest of the natural order.
Sam Keen
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Without reverence we [people] will gradually descend into ecocide. In the degree that the imperatives of the market - the temple of the Mall - govern our lives, we are in escalating danger of destroying the commonwealth of all sentient beings - bugs and bees and buntings - on which we depend for a luxurious life on planet earth.
Sam Keen
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The 'still, small voice' of God never calls on me to be like another man. It appeals to me to rise to my full stature and fulfill the promise that sleeps within my being.
Sam Keen
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Mounting an expedition to actualize a Compassionate Commonwealth of all peoples...is the great spiritual challenge of our time.
Sam Keen
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The telling of your stories is a revolutionary act.
Sam Keen
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I think it's increasingly hard to have deep self-knowledge without entering the darkness in some way.
Sam Keen
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You come to love not by discovering the ideal individual, yet by figuring out how to see a blemished individual flawlessly.
Sam Keen
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When you genuinely lose your illusions, you begin to marvel at things, because you don't have the answers any more.
Sam Keen
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Compassion begins with the acknowledgment of the single inescapable truth that is the foundation for the possibility of love between human beings - an awareness of the tragic sense of life.
Sam Keen
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Throughout my life, I've had different metaphors for freedom. At one time, it was skin diving. In the ocean you feel weightless you escape from gravity.
Sam Keen
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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
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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.
Sam Keen
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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
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In the degree that we remember and retell our stories and create new ones we become the authors, the authorities, of our own lives.
Sam Keen
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I've spent my life cultivating knowledge of myself. But the more I know myself, the more utterly mysterious I become.
Sam Keen
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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
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Burnout is nature's way of telling you, you've been going through the motions your soul has departed you're a zombie, a member of the walking dead, a sleepwalker. False optimism is like administrating stimulants to an exhausted nervous system.
Sam Keen
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The sacred is discovered in what moves and touches us, in what makes us tremble.
Sam Keen
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The abyss beyond our beliefs is something we have to pass through in order to see the world anew, to see it in terms not dictated so much by our culture, our parents, or our religious convictions.
Sam Keen