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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: 54
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Philosopher
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More quotes by Sam Keen

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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
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A man must go on a quest / to discover the sacred fire / in the sanctuary of his own belly / to ignite the flame in his heart / to fuel the blaze in the hearth / to rekindle his ardor for the earth
Sam Keen
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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
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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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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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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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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
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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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It's interesting that the worse things get, the more we believe the next technological fix is going to get us out of it. But it's like being in quicksand: the more you struggle the deeper you sink.
Sam Keen
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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
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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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The more you become a connoisseur of gratitude, the less you are a victim of resentment, depression, and despair.
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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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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The sacred is discovered in what moves and touches us, in what makes us tremble.
Sam Keen
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What shapes our lives are the questions we ask, refuse to ask, or never think to ask.
Sam Keen
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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
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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
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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
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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