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Hell is not fire and brimstone, not a place where you are punished for lying or cheating or stealing. Hell is wanting to be something and somewhere different from where you are.

Stephen Levine

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Stephen Levine
Age: 78 †
Born: 1937
Born: July 17
Died: 2016
Died: January 17
Poet
Screenwriter
the United States of America
Stephan Levine
Place
Cheating
Different
Stealing
Something
Wanting
Appreciation
Somewhere
Hell
Fire
Brimstone
Lying
Punished

More quotes by Stephen Levine

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Our addiction to always being right is a great block to the truth. It keeps us from the kind of openness that comes from confidence in our natural wisdom.
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If you want the other person more than anything else in the world, you're in major trouble and the relationship is a wobbly pivot. It's different if the thing you want most in the world is truth, and your partner is the person you want most in the world.
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Your distance from your partner is the distance from your heart. The things that make relationships difficult are some of the most precious aspects to us.
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Forgiveness is mental floss! Build the capacity to forgive slowly - start with little unkind acts, otherwise you'll sabotage yourself. When we forgive, we forgive the actor, not the action.
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Letting the last breath come. Letting the last breath go. Dissolving, dissolving into vast space, the light body released from its heavier form. A sense of connectedness with all that is, all sense of separation dissolved in the vastness of being. Each breath melting into space as though it were the last.
Stephen Levine
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Wanting things to be otherwise is the very essence of suffering. We almost never directly experience what pain is because our reaction to it is so immediate that most of what we call pain is actually our experience of resistance to that phenomenon. And the resistance is usually a good deal more painful than the original sensation.
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Letting go of our suffering is the hardest work we will ever do. It is also the most fruitful. To heal means to meet ourselves in a new way -- in the newness of each moment where all is possible and nothing is limited to the old.
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Let there be peace on earth and let it begin with me. There is nothing to do but be.
Stephen Levine
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Much thought has at its root a dissatisfaction with what is. Wanting is the urge for the next moment to contain what this moment does not. When there is wanting in the mind, that moment feels incomplete. Wanting is seeing elsewhere. Completeness is being right here.
Stephen Levine
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I have never lived a life so much larger than death. (93)
Stephen Levine
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You can call it wisdom, or sanity, or health, or enlightenment. I use the word God as a short-cut. I am comfortable with the word God because I don't have the foggiest idea of what it means.
Stephen Levine
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How soon will we accept this opportunity to be fully alive before we die? (88)
Stephen Levine
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When we see all women as the divine mother and all men as the divine father, everyone you meet is sacred.
Stephen Levine
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Relate to the fear, not just from it. (50)
Stephen Levine
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Understanding is the ultimate seduction of the mind. Go to the truth beyond the mind.
Stephen Levine
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When the heart acknowledges how much pain there is in the mind, it turns like a mother toward a frightened child.
Stephen Levine
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We've all been should upon enough.
Stephen Levine
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[D]etachment means letting go and nonattachment means simply letting be. (95)
Stephen Levine
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Safety is the most unsafe spiritual path you can take. Safety keeps you numb and dead. People are caught by surprise when it is time to die. They have allowed themselves to live so little.
Stephen Levine
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It doesn't matter how long you forget, only how soon you remember!
Stephen Levine