Quote

Sometimes pain and illness are not meant to be removed. You can't second-guess God. Rather than praying for it to go away, it's often wiser to pray that you learn as much from it as you possibly can.

Stephen Levine

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Stephen Levine
Age: 78 †
Born: 1937
Born: July 17
Died: 2016
Died: January 17
Poet
Screenwriter
the United States of America
Stephan Levine
Learn
Possibly
Pain
Illness
Often
Pray
Away
Meant
Sometimes
Praying
Much
Guess
Second
Removed
Rather
Wiser

More quotes by Stephen Levine

Image
When the heart acknowledges how much pain there is in the mind, it turns like a mother toward a frightened child.
Stephen Levine
Image
Grief can have a quality of profound healing because we are forced to a depth of feeling that is usually below the threshold of awareness.
Stephen Levine
Image
When we see all women as the divine mother and all men as the divine father, everyone you meet is sacred.
Stephen Levine
Image
Let there be peace on earth and let it begin with me. There is nothing to do but be.
Stephen Levine
Image
Death is just a change in lifestyles.
Stephen Levine
Image
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
Image
We are so numb we don't even know what a direct experience is. We have an experience, then we think about it and we think the thinking about it is the experience.
Stephen Levine
Image
Go to the truth beyond the mind. Love is the bridge.
Stephen Levine
Image
It doesn't matter how long you forget, only how soon you remember!
Stephen Levine
Image
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.
Stephen Levine
Image
Nothing is more natural than grief, no emotion more common to our daily experience. It's an innate response to loss in a world where everything is impermanent.
Stephen Levine
Image
If sequestered pain made a sound, the atmosphere would be humming all the time.
Stephen Levine
Image
[D]etachment means letting go and nonattachment means simply letting be. (95)
Stephen Levine
Image
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
Image
Relate to the fear, not just from it. (50)
Stephen Levine
Image
Death is perfectly safe. (55)
Stephen Levine
Image
Quoting son, Noah Levine: Once you see what the heart really needs, it doesn’t matter if you’re going to live or die, the work is always the same. (25)
Stephen Levine
Image
In Chinese, the word for heart and mind is the same -- Hsin. For when the heart is open and the mind is clear they are of one substance, of one essence.
Stephen Levine
Image
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.
Stephen Levine
Image
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.
Stephen Levine