Quote

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

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
Word
Sanity
Idea
Enlightenment
Use
Short
Means
Cutting
Ideas
Comfortable
Mean
Health
Wisdom
Call

More quotes by Stephen Levine

Image
That which is impermanent attracts compassion. That which is not provides wisdom. (116)
Stephen Levine
Image
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
Image
The demons aren't the noise. They are our aversion to the noise...when you can accept discomfort, doing so allows a balance of mind. That surrender, that letting go of wanting anything to be other than it is right in the moment, is what frees us from hell.
Stephen Levine
Image
Acting from the appropriateness of the heart, we are freed from the neediness of the mind.
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
[D]etachment means letting go and nonattachment means simply letting be. (95)
Stephen Levine
Image
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
Image
It doesn't matter how long you forget, only how soon you remember!
Stephen Levine
Image
I have never lived a life so much larger than death. (93)
Stephen Levine
Image
Death is just a change in lifestyles.
Stephen Levine
Image
We've all been should upon enough.
Stephen Levine
Image
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.
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
If you can find the God inside yourself, you can find the God inside everybody.
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
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
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
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.
Stephen Levine
Image
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
Image
Our suffering is caused by holding on to how things might have been, should have been, could have been.
Stephen Levine