Sam Keen Quotes

#1. You come to love not by discovering the ideal individual, yet by figuring out how to see a blemished individual flawlessly.

Sam Keen

#2. 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

#3. If we come from good families where we have been supported well, there is a disillusionment we have to undergo in terms of the culture's values. We have to get beyond our cultural mythology to find out who we are.

Sam Keen

#4. Trust what moves you most deeply.

Sam Keen

#5. You don't go through a deep personal transformation without some kind of dark night of the soul.

Sam Keen

#6. The lover heals the world not by a vague and abstract love for everybody and everything, but by becoming passionate and vowing fidelity to concrete relationships, persons, institutions, and places.

Sam Keen

#7. To really love a person completely is to come to a point where your stories are intertwined.

Sam Keen

#8. The world is run largely by urban, sedentary males. The symbol of power is the chair.

Sam Keen

#9. To love is to return to a home we never left, to remember who we are.

Sam Keen

#10. Freud articulated the standard opinion when he asked with supposed seriousness, 'What does a woman want?' ... Today the question that is the yeast in the social dough is, 'What do men want?

Sam Keen

#11. We can only choose whether we will feel and not what we will feel.

Sam Keen

#12. 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

#13. The spiritual mind is always metaphorical. Spiritual thinking is poetic thinking. It's always trying to put a very diaphanous experience into words, realizing all the while that words are inadequate.

Sam Keen

#14. It's perfectly possible to spend forty hours a week on a job that's meaningless, as long as you know what your real vocation is and find some way to express it. Then you won't confuse your job with the meaning of your life.

Sam Keen

#15. 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

#16. Deep summer is when laziness finds respectability.

Sam Keen

#17. There is a saying in Bali: "We have no art. We do everything as beautifully as possible." This reflects my philosophy of practice. I try to remember daily what a gift it is to have the privilege of living in this wondrous world.

Sam Keen

#18. If we don't preserve forest habitat for spotted owls, then soon we won't have trees to refresh the air we breathe. And we're realizing that this applies to social ecology, as well.

Sam Keen

#19. To be on a quest is nothing more or less than to become an asker of questions.

Sam Keen

#20. If we had a better understanding of the ways we think about enemies, we might be able to think of more rational ways of settling conflict.

Sam Keen

#21. Every time I come across a rattlesnake on my farm I initially react in fear and am tempted to kill it. Then I realize I wouldn't want to live in a world where all wild things - without and within - are domesticated.

Sam Keen

#22. I suspect that we are all recipients of cosmic love notes. Messages, omens, voices, cries, revelations, and appeals are homogenized into each day's events. If only we knew how to listen, to read the signs.

Sam Keen

#23. The question that surrounds lovemaking is, "Did you cum?" and the unasked question beneath that is, "Am I all right?

Sam Keen

#24. What shapes our lives are the questions we ask, refuse to ask, or never think to ask.

Sam Keen

#25. Love isn't finding a perfect person. It's seeing an imperfect person perfectly.

Sam Keen

#26. I think that critiquing the myths of our society and helping people find their way through them is a very important thing. It's a theme that goes through all of my work.

Sam Keen

#27. The telling of your stories is a revolutionary act.

Sam Keen

#28. 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

#29. You can know what's in your life when you know what's in your heart.

Sam Keen

#30. 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

#31. What happens if I try to build a life dedicated to avoiding all danger and all unnecessary risk?

Sam Keen

#32. I think there are families that are very kind and supportive of people's ability to change. People who come from such families may go through life without dipping into the dark night.

Sam Keen

#33. Enter each day with the expectation that the happenings of the day may contain a clandestine message addressed to you personally. Expect omens, epiphanies, casual blessings and teachers who unknowingly speak to your condition.

Sam Keen

#34. 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

#35. At thirty I lived in a world where death wasn't immediately real; it was always something "out there." My deeply held illusions of immortality - a product of my very conservative religious upbringing - were still pretty much intact.

Sam Keen

#36. We suffer from the illusion that the faster we run, the more likely we are to grasp happiness. The truth is that the velocity necessary for success rarely exceeds the rate of reflection.

Sam Keen

#37. 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

#38. Without knowing how to calculate the odds on such matters, it seems improbably to me that God would have whispered the meaning of my life into the ear of some guru or authority.

Sam Keen

#39. In the beginning, we create the enemy. Before the weapon comes the image. We think others to death and then invent the battle-axe or ballistic missiles with which to actually kill them. Propaganda precedes technology.

Sam Keen

#40. Freedom is an inside job.

Sam Keen

#41. When you genuinely lose your illusions, you begin to marvel at things, because you don't have the answers any more.

Sam Keen

#42. One part of love is sweet and easy, something we fall into and are swept away by. But the other part is hard: it requires discipline, willpower, and opening your heart again and again to someone with whom you are angry, can't stand, and do not like.

Sam Keen

#43. I think it's increasingly hard to have deep self-knowledge without entering the darkness in some way.

Sam Keen

#44. We come to love not by finding a perfect person, but by learning to see an imperfect person perfectly.

Sam Keen

#45. I fall into all kinds of inauthenticity when I conspire to forget my mortality.

Sam Keen

#46. The sacred is discovered in what moves and touches us, in what makes us tremble.

Sam Keen

#47. Down to earth advice about the path that leads away from the kingdom of the hollow men.

Sam Keen

#48. We now realize that we're not living in a piecemeal world, but a world where everything is linked together.

Sam Keen

#49. 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

#50. The deepest mystery comes not when we don't know somebody well, but when we do.

Sam Keen

#51. 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

#52. I think we're always in the process of writing and rewriting the story of our lives, forming our experiences into a narrative that makes sense. Much of that work involves demythologizing family myths and cultural myths - getting free of what we have been told about ourselves.

Sam Keen

#53. 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

#54. 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

#55. We [people] may enjoy this fleeting beauty [of life] for such a brief instance. And then we are compost. G - , the creator-destroyer, certainly has a strange sense of humor!

Sam Keen

#56. 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

#57. There is the extreme of hopelessness and the inevitability of doom, a deep despair that comes from the sense that our industrial, consuming society is jeopardizing the planet.

Sam Keen

#58. 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

#59. 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

#60. There has always been a part of me that saw wilderness and risk-taking as the path to freedom.

Sam Keen

#61. Myth is the system of basic metaphors, images, and stories that informs the perceptions, memories, and aspirations of a people; provides the rationale for its institutions, rituals and power structure; and gives a map of the purpose and stages of life.

Sam Keen

#62. 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

#63. To cultivate love, or whole-soul-fulness, we must resist the temptation to be upwardly mobile, to be always on the move, to pull up our roots and fly to the mythic kingdom of Elsewhere.

Sam Keen

#64. The root of humanly caused evil is not man's animal nature, not territorial aggression, or innate selfishness, but our need to gain self-esteem, deny our mortality, and achieve a heroic self-image. Our desire for the best is the cause of the worst.

Sam Keen

#65. To sustain love, a man and a woman must continually be marrying and divorcing, moving with, against, away from, and beyond each other, saying 'yes' and 'no'.

Sam Keen

#66. In a pluralistic culture ... every individual must create a private mythological system. I must discover within myself the Garden of Eden from which I am exiled and the New Jeruselem toward which I am journeying. And must bear the burden of being my own redeemer, my own Christ.

Sam Keen

#67. 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

#68. 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

#69. 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

#70. Mounting an expedition to actualize a Compassionate Commonwealth of all peoples ... is the great spiritual challenge of our time.

Sam Keen

#71. Mystical experiences (unlike scientific conclusions) cannot be communicated from one person to another. Philosophers and little children are continually amazed that we, unaccountably, find ourselves in a somewhat intelligible world.

Sam Keen

#72. I try to steer away from high metaphysical belief because I think we humans do best when we realize that we don't know all that much.

Sam Keen

#73. The more we chase away the false mysteries - those things we think we know about ourselves and others - the more mysterious our existence becomes.

Sam Keen

#74. 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

#75. The best practice is to follow the advice posted on every railroad crossing: Stop. Look. Listen.

Sam Keen