Eisenstein Quotes

#1. Are the problems of the world caused by bad people who need to be crushed? Or do people do bad things when they are in a certain situation? If it is the latter, then we can go around crushing the villains for another thousand years and nothing will change. - Author: Charles Eisenstein

#2. story is most aligned with who you truly are, and who you truly want to be?" "Which story gives you the most joy? - Author: Charles Eisenstein

#3. We sense that 'normal' isn't coming back, that we are being born into a new normal: a new kind of society, a new relationship to the earth, a new experience of being human. - Author: Charles Eisenstein

#4. Let me repeat that: Our civilization is constitutionally incapable of reversing the annihilation of natural capital, or even slowing it down. Get used to that. When we really understand that, the project of reconceiving civilization itself will gain powerful impetus. - Author: Charles Eisenstein

#5. Even in a less exaggerated description, any verbal account of a person is bound to find itself employing an assortment of waterfalls, lightning rods, landscapes, birds, etc. - Author: Sergei Eisenstein

#6. You can't have community as an add-on to a monetized life. You have to actually need each other. - Author: Charles Eisenstein

#7. True discipline is really just self-remembering; no forcing or fighting is necessary. - Author: Charles Eisenstein

#8. We delude ourselves when we suppose than the main impact of speech lies in the words (as opposed to the voice), just as we delude ourselves when we cite logical reasons, which are actually rationalizations or justifications, for our decisions. - Author: Charles Eisenstein

#9. The destructive potential of language is contained within the very nature of representation. Words, particularly nouns, force an infinite of unique objects and processes into a finite number of categories. - Author: Charles Eisenstein

#10. Eisenstein was a good editor. I was trained as a film editor, and I've no doubt that the editor is key to a film. - Author: Peter Greenaway

#11. We have to appeal to what moves us: the love of our beautiful planet. - Author: Charles Eisenstein

#12. Down the steps,
... over the corpses,
... careers the pram with the child. - Author: Sergei Eisenstein

#13. When do you manipulate others for your own advantage? When I notice myself doing it, usually it is when I am feeling insecure. - Author: Charles Eisenstein

#14. The force of love, the force of reunion is unstoppable. - Author: Charles Eisenstein

#15. The profession of film director can and should be such a high and precious one; that no man aspiring to it can disregard any knowledge that will make him a better film director or human being. - Author: Sergei Eisenstein

#16. Trust your intuition and be guided by love. - Author: Charles Eisenstein

#17. How do we change the world? Change the story. - Author: Charles Eisenstein

#18. An economist says that essentially more for you is less for me, but the lover knows that more for you is more for me, too. - Author: Charles Eisenstein

#19. And given how much of the evil and ugliness of the present world can be traced to money, can you imagine what the world will be like when money has been transformed? - Author: Charles Eisenstein

#20. It is quite normal to fear what one most desires. We desire to transcend the Story of the World that has come to enslave us, that indeed is killing the planet. We fear what the end of that story will bring: the demise of much that is familiar.
Fear it or not, it is happening already. - Author: Charles Eisenstein

#21. We are born creators, here to achieve the exuberant expression of our gifts. The - Author: Charles Eisenstein

#22. feel that, in a way, with the people near me and myself, it is much easier to give ourselves to what we do without fear, with true joy and with a feeling of belonging. - Author: Charles Eisenstein

#23. Ten Days That Shook The World, by Eisenstein, I went to see it, and I was so impressed with this film, so impressed with what cinema could do. - Author: Francis Ford Coppola

#24. As I mentioned earlier, the time to do is when you know what to do. When you don't know what to do, and act anyway, you are probably acting out of habit. - Author: Charles Eisenstein

#25. We need to change our habits of thought, belief, and doing as well as change our systems. Each level reinforces the other: Our habits and beliefs form the psychic substructure of our system, which in turn induces in us the corresponding beliefs and habits. - Author: Charles Eisenstein

#26. If you want a convincing account of just how deep the shift in our new axial age is and must be, look no further than this brilliant book by Charles Eisenstein, one of the deepest integrative thinkers active today. - Author: Michel Bauwens

#27. When we attempt to reduce the infinitely precious to a number, monstrosities result. For - Author: Charles Eisenstein

#28. Contemporaneous with the financial crisis we have an ecological crisis and a health crisis. They are intimately interlinked. We cannot convert much more of the earth into money, or much more of our health into money, before the basis of life itself is threatened. - Author: Charles Eisenstein

#29. There are many photos of Eisenstein. I think he was quite vain, and he liked photos of him. Being a virgin at 33 is strange now, but let's not be too high-minded about that. - Author: Peter Greenaway

#30. Accordingly, to create objects with soul, objects for a rich and beautiful world, we must invest them with life, self, and humanity; in other words, we must invest them with something of our selves. No - Author: Charles Eisenstein

#31. To be fully in service to something one has experienced as real is the essence of leadership in a nonhierarchical age. A leader is the holder of a story, someone whose experience of its reality is deep enough so that she can hold the belief on behalf of others. - Author: Charles Eisenstein

#32. The gift economy represents a shift from consumption to contribution, transaction to trust, scarcity to abundance and isolation to community. - Author: Charles Eisenstein

#33. Through a million little choices every day, we are cashing in the earth. - Author: Charles Eisenstein

#34. Being correspondent of a Left paper with a name like Eisenstein deprived one of one's chance of usefulness. Besides - Author: Ford Madox Ford

#35. The truth is, has always been, and always will be that we are utterly and hopelessly dependent on each other and on nature. Nor - Author: Charles Eisenstein

#36. The logic is backwards. Genius is the result of doing what you love, not a prerequisite for it. - Author: Charles Eisenstein

#37. We need to ground environmentalism on something other than data. - Author: Charles Eisenstein

#38. Above all, the normalcy of society's routines tells us that this way of life is normal. For many people, the most powerful enforcer of the habits of separation is money. Usually, - Author: Charles Eisenstein

#39. When both sides of a controversy revel in the defeat and humiliation of the other side, in fact they are on the same side: the side of war. - Author: Charles Eisenstein

#40. [Akiro] Kurosawa, no doubt, was a big influence. Movies sometimes more than directors have influenced me: The Grapes of Wrath, by John Ford, was an extraordinary discovery. Sergei Eisenstein, of course. Later on, [Ingmar] Bergman. - Author: Costa-Gavras

#41. For a machine to run smoothly and predictably,
its parts must be standard and hence replaceable,
features which contribute, respectively,
to modern depersonalization and anxiety. - Author: Charles Eisenstein

#42. Of all the things that human beings make and do for each other, it is the unquantifiable ones that contribute most to human happiness. - Author: Charles Eisenstein

#43. Each person you interact with, is an entire universe unto themselves, a Divine Being, unspeakabley precious. - Author: Charles Eisenstein

#44. I've always been fascinated by Eisenstein. - Author: Peter Greenaway

#45. Utopia is a collective shift of perception away. Abundance is all around us. Only our efforts at tower-building blind us to it, our gaze forever skyward, forever seeking to escape this Earth, this feeling, this moment. - Author: Charles Eisenstein

#46. No one's ever completely broken. It's just a matter of how much has to fall apart before the ember of life is exposed to air. - Author: Charles Eisenstein

#47. There have been only three epoch-making mathematicians, Archimedes, Newton, and Eisenstein. - Author: Carl Friedrich Gauss

#48. I remember as a child hearing of the horrors of life in the Soviet Union. There was supposedly only one kind of store, a gigantic windowless dispensary staffed by listless, surly functionaries selling cheaply made, generic goods. It sounds a lot like Wal-Mart. - Author: Charles Eisenstein

#49. I would like to propose that the reason our actions have been so manifestly unsuccessful in steering the world away from its present collision course is that we have not, generally speaking, been basing them on any true understanding. - Author: Charles Eisenstein

#50. One should make movies innocently - the way Adam and Eve named the animals, their first day in the garden ... Learn from your own interior vision of things, as if there had never been a D.W.Griffith, or a Eisenstein, or a [John] Ford, or a [Jean] Renoir, or anybody. - Author: Orson Welles

#51. A miracle is an invitation into a new story. - Author: Charles Eisenstein

#52. Community is woven from gifts, which is ultimately why poor people often have stronger communities than rich people. If you are financially independent, then you really don't depend on your neighbors for anything. You can just pay someone to do it. - Author: Charles Eisenstein

#53. Now why should the cinema follow the forms of theater and painting rather than the methodology of language, which allows wholly new concepts of ideas to arise from the combination of two concrete denotations of two concrete objects? - Author: Sergei Eisenstein

#54. The things we think we want are often substitutes for what we really want, and the pleasures we seek are less than the joy that they distract us from. - Author: Charles Eisenstein

#55. Each experience of love nudges us toward the Story of Interbeing, because it only fits into that story and defies the logic of Separation. - Author: Charles Eisenstein

#56. A revolution that leaves our conceptualization of self and world intact cannot bring other than temporary, superficial change. Only a much deeper revolution, a reconceiving of who we are, can reverse the crises of our age. - Author: Charles Eisenstein

#57. We have to create miracles. A miracle is not the intersession of an external divine agency in violation of the laws of physics. A miracle is simply something that is impossible from an old story but possible from within a new one. It is an expansion of what is possible. - Author: Charles Eisenstein

#58. There are puppet-masters, but they are systems and ideologies, not people. As - Author: Charles Eisenstein

#59. Everyone is a puppet, but there are no puppet-masters. - Author: Charles Eisenstein

#60. The world is on fire! Why am I sitting in front of my computer? It is because I don't have a fire extinguisher for the world, and there isn't a global 911 to call. - Author: Charles Eisenstein

#61. Play is the production of fun; entertainment is the consumption of fun. - Author: Charles Eisenstein

#62. Maintaining focus on the breath cannot happen through forcing, but only through allowing. In fact, it is extremely easy; our habit of making things hard is what gets in the way. - Author: Charles Eisenstein

#63. We are all here to contribute our gifts toward something greater than ourselves, and will never be content unless we are. - Author: Charles Eisenstein

#64. When everything is subject to money, then the scarcity of money makes everything scarce, including the basis of human life and happiness. Such is the life of the slave - one whose actions are compelled by threat to survival. Perhaps the deepest indication of our slavery is the monetization of time. - Author: Charles Eisenstein

#65. How beautiful can life be? We hardly dare imagine it. - Author: Charles Eisenstein

#66. Alphabets therefore encourage an atomistic conception of meaning and, by extension, of the universe - Author: Charles Eisenstein

#67. To be in community is to be in personal, interdependent relationship, and it comes with a price: our illusion of independence, our freedom from obligation. You can't have it both ways. If you want community, you must be willing to be obligated, dependent, tied, attached. You will - Author: Charles Eisenstein

#68. What you're looking for, you won't find. But only by looking for it can it find you. - Author: Charles Eisenstein

#69. It is art's task to make manifest the contradictions of Being - Author: Sergei Eisenstein

#70. Enlightenment is a group activity. - Author: Charles Eisenstein

#71. The radiance of that which wants to be born illuminates the shadows, bringing them into the light of awareness that they may be healed. - Author: Charles Eisenstein

#72. Time is life. When we experience time as scarce, we experience life as short and poor. - Author: Charles Eisenstein

#73. When you hear the phrase "rescue the financial system," translate it in your mind into "keep the debts on the books." They are trying to find a way for you (and debtor nations too) to keep paying and for the debt to keep growing. - Author: Charles Eisenstein

#74. The financial crisis we are facing today arises from the fact that there is almost no more social, cultural, natural, and spiritual capital left to convert into money. - Author: Charles Eisenstein

#75. I think most kids have a sense that it's not supposed to be this way. You're not supposed to hate Monday, or be happy when you don't have to go to school. School should be something that you love. Life should be something that you love. - Author: Charles Eisenstein

#76. But when we recognize that these are not really what we desire, our goal becomes not to suppress desire but to identify the true want or need, and to fulfill it. That is no trivial task; it is a profound path of self-realization. - Author: Charles Eisenstein

#77. The hippies saw it and lived it for a few shining moments, but the old stories were too strong. Instead of the hippies pulling us all into a new world, we dragged them back into ours. The - Author: Charles Eisenstein

#78. There is a time to act, and a time to wait, to listen, to observe. Then understanding and clarity can grow. From understanding, action arises that is purposeful, firm, and powerful. - Author: Charles Eisenstein

#79. Is it too much to ask, to live in a world where our human gifts go toward the benefit of all? Where our daily activities contribute to the healing of the biosphere and the well-being of other people? - Author: Charles Eisenstein

#80. The holistic acupuncturist and the sea turtle rescuer may not be able to explain the feeling, 'We are serving the same thing,' but they are. Both are in service to an emerging story of the People that is the defining mythology of a new kind of civilization. - Author: Charles Eisenstein

#81. The power of attention is much greater than the force of self-restraint. - Author: Charles Eisenstein

#82. More than a mere alternative strategy, regenerative agriculture represents a fundamental shift in our culture's relationship to nature. - Author: Charles Eisenstein

#83. Our peaceful hearts change the situation, disrupting the story in which hate comes naturally and offering an experience that suggests a new one. - Author: Charles Eisenstein

#84. The key to this paradox lies within you, in the feeling you carry that each of your actions, even your personal, secret struggles, has cosmic significance. You will know then, as you know now, that everything you do matters. - Author: Charles Eisenstein

#85. The state of interbeing is a vulnerable state. It is the vulnerability of the naive altruist, of the trusting lover, of the unguarded sharer. To enter it, one must leave behind the seeming shelter of a control-based life, protected by walls of cynicism, judgment, and blame. - Author: Charles Eisenstein

#86. There is a vast territory between what we're trying to leave behind, and where we want to go - and we don't have any maps for that territory. - Author: Charles Eisenstein

#87. For example, in painting the form arises from abstract elements of line and color, while in cinema the material concreteness of the image within the frame presents - as an element - the greatest difficulty in manipulation. - Author: Sergei Eisenstein

#88. We are not just a skin-encapsulated ego, a soul encased in flesh. We are each other and we are the world. - Author: Charles Eisenstein

#89. Here is another paradox: We become better people only when we give up the quest to become better people. That - Author: Charles Eisenstein

#90. The Situational Character: A Critical Realist Perspective on the Human Animal" by Jon D. Hanson and David G. Yosifon, along with its companion piece, "The Situation: An Introduction to the Situational Character, Critical Realism, Power Economics, and Deep Capture." Situationism - Author: Charles Eisenstein

#91. Without deep work on yourself, how will you avoid re-creating your own internalized oppression in all that you do? - Author: Charles Eisenstein

#92. Even the most thorough change happens once choice at a time - Author: Charles Eisenstein

#93. In a gift economy, the more you give, the richer you are. - Author: Charles Eisenstein

#94. Mexican cinematographers Gabriel Figueroa and Emilio Fernandez were students of both Sergei Eisenstein and Toland. Their exteriors and lighting were gorgeous. And the films Ingmar Bergman did with Sven Nykvist were exceptional. - Author: Vilmos Zsigmond

#95. The primary method by which governments increase their control is by creating fear. - Author: Charles Eisenstein

#96. To name is to dominate, to categorize, to subjugate and, quite literally, to objectify - Author: Charles Eisenstein

#97. The apparent objectivity of written words explains why people tend to believe what they read more than what they hear - Author: Charles Eisenstein

#98. Addiction, self-sabotage, procrastination, laziness, rage, chronic fatigue, and depression are all ways that we withhold our full participation in the program of life we are offered. When the conscious mind cannot find a reason to say no, the unconscious says no in its own way. - Author: Charles Eisenstein

#99. American capitalism finds its sharpest and most expressive reflection in the American cinema. - Author: Sergei Eisenstein

#100. We have to believe in a more beautiful world in order to serve it. - Author: Charles Eisenstein