Quotes About Separateness

#1. The sense of community does not arise out of collective movement, nor from conforming to some group direction. Quite the contrary. Each individual tends to use the opportunity to become all that he or she can become. Separateness and diversity - the uniqueness of being "me" - are experienced

Carl Rogers

#2. The greatest tragedy of human existence is the illusion of separateness.

Albert Einstein

#3. All suffering is caused by the illusion of separateness, which generates fear and self-hatred, which eventually causes illness. You are the master of your life. You can do much more than you thought you could, including cure yourself of a "terminal illness".

Barbara Brennan

#4. Love rests on two pillars: surrender and autonomy. Our need for togetherness exists alongside our need for separateness.

Esther Perel

#5. Everything is a gift of the universe -even joy, anger, jealously, frustration, or separateness. Everything is perfect either for our growth or our enjoyment.

Ken Keyes Jr.

#6. As a holistic being you shatter the illusion of your separateness and reveal your connection to everything. This empowers you in a way that the ego-driven self could never contemplate.

Wayne Dyer

#7. After the first establishment of identity there comes the imperative need to lose this new-found sense of separateness and to belong to something larger and more powerful than the weak, lonely self. The sense of moral isolation is intolerable to us.

Carson McCullers

#8. It is not that things are delusory but their separateness in the fabric of the Whole that is illusory ...

Frederick Franck

#9. Respect ... is appreciation of the separateness of the other person, of the ways in which he or she is unique.

Annie Gottlieb

#10. Love is union with somebody, or something, outside oneself, under the condition of retaining the separateness and integrity of one's own self.

Erich Fromm

#11. Becoming a part of a group, helps moderate the feelings of aloneness and separateness.

Dan Matzke

#12. Good is that which makes for unity. Evil is that which makes for separateness.

Aldous Huxley

#13. The intellect is a beautiful servant but a terrible master. Intellect is the power tool of our separateness. The intuitive, compassionate heart is the doorway to our unity.

Ram Dass

#14. Love means tearing down the separateness and the boundaries between your heart feelings and another person ...

Ken Keyes Jr.

#15. But she let him stay that one time. Fatigue from fighting him, maybe. Maybe the sense of loneliness when the man's body withdrew so quickly, and you felt the cold between your legs and the abrupt sense of separateness again.

Pamela Erens

#16. The spectacle thus unites what is separate, but it unites it only in its separateness.

Guy Debord

#17. A mystic sees beyond the illusion of separateness into the intricate web of life in which all things are expressions of a single Whole. You can call this web "God, the Tao, the Great Spirit, the Infinite Mystery, Mother or Father," but it can be known only as love.

Joan Z. Borysenko

#18. When this delusion of utter separateness underlies and governs whatever I think, say, and do, what kind of world do I create?

Eckhart Tolle

#19. We are part of the whole which we call the universe, but it is an optical delusion of our mind that we think we are separate. This separateness is like a prison for us. Our job is to widen the circle of our compassion so we feel connected with all people and situations.

Albert Einstein

#20. The sense of separateness from the rest of the world, as if everyone else knew the part they were playing but I'd never been given a script.

John O'Farrell

#21. Pilgrimage to the place of the wise is to find escape from the flame of separateness.

Rumi

#22. We assure you there is no separateness between you and God/Goddess/The All That Is other than your perception.

Rene Gaudette

#23. Look at all the conflict between tribes, nations, and religions. They need their enemies, because they provide the sense of separateness on which their collective egoic identity depends.

Eckhart Tolle

#24. Spiritual awakening is exactly dropping the sense of one's narrow separateness; it is essentially and profoundly altruistic.

Norman Fischer

#25. In separateness lies the world's greatest misery; in compassion lies the world's true strength.

Gautama Buddha

#26. Compassion and pity are very different. Whereas compassion reflects the yearning of the heart to merge and take on some of the suffering, pity is a controlled set of thoughts designed to assure separateness. Compassion is the spontaneous response of love; pity, the involuntary reflex of fear.

Ram Dass

#27. is satisfying, not frightening, not empty. It is an illusion of reality created by ignorance that is so unbearable. The illusion of separateness, the illusion of connectedness to disconnected hardened hearts and closed minds is the source of the suffering that we would all wish to be free of.

Mitch Halper

#28. The intimacy of love absolves us of our guilty separateness.

Mason Cooley

#29. We are here to awaken from our illusion of separateness.

Thich Nhat Hanh

#30. Aristotle said that only two living entities are capable of complete solitude and complete separateness: God and beast. Because of this the most acute form of suffering for human beings is loneliness.

Chris Hedges

#31. The spirit of rejection finds its support in the consciousness of separateness; the spirit of acceptance finds its base in the consciousness of unity.

Rabindranath Tagore

#32. All the big problems of the world today are routed in the philosophy of separateness and dualism.

Satish Kumar

#33. I've always thought that love thrives on a certain kind of distance, that it requires an awed separateness to continue. Without that necessary remove, the physical minutiae of the other person grows ugly in its magnification.

Siri Hustvedt

#34. God had no problem with the man's separateness, his uniqueness, or his wholeness.

Myles Munroe

#35. Here's an idea: How about just 'Americans?' That has a nice ring to it, if you ask me. Placing undue emphasis on our 'separateness' is a step backward. Bring back the melting pot.

Bobby Jindal

#36. I've always known, on a purely intellectual level, that our separateness and isolation are an illusion. We're all made of the same thing - the blown-out pieces of matter formed in the fires of dead stars.

Blake Crouch

#37. Contemplative living is living in true relationship with oneself, God, others and nature, free of the illusions of separateness.

Thomas Merton

#38. Intimacy requires an ability to both merge and be separate, to come together and be apart, like oscillating on a giant swing from oneness to separateness, creating a constant rhythm.

Charlotte Sophia Kasl

#39. The great human problem of evil stems from the illusion of separateness. Whenever this illusion is overcome, we behave lovingly to one another.

Barbara Marx Hubbard

#40. We love as soon as we learn to distinguish a separate 'you' and 'me.' Love is our attempt to assuage the terror and isolation of that separateness.

Judith Viorst

#41. The deepest need of the human being is to overcome our
separateness, to leave the prison of our loneliness.

Erich Fromm

#42. The isolation, the separateness, is always a part of any utopia.

Toni Morrison

#43. Erotic love begins with separateness, and ends in oneness. Motherly love begins with oneness, and leads to separateness.

Erich Fromm

#44. Thus, within Linnaean terminology, a female characteristic (the lactating mamma) ties humans to brutes, while a traditionally male characteristic (reason) marks our separateness.

Londa Schiebinger

#45. There is an inherent unity and harmony in the universe. The divisions and disharmony we find on earth are created by the perception of separateness that people developed over a period of time.

Thomas Vazhakunnathu

#46. Tenderness emerges from the fact that the two persons, longing, as all individuals do, to overcome the separateness and isolation to which we are all heir because we are individuals, can participate in a relationship that, for the moment, is not of two isolated selves but a union

Rollo May

#47. Personality is a manifestation of ego. Ego is the central sense of separateness that a person has from the rest of the universe. Personality is the form that that separateness take.

Frederick Lenz

#48. Nothing causes more people to deny God, misunderstand God, mistreat others, or abuse Nature more than the illusion of separateness.
Nothing.
No thing.

Donald L. Hicks

#49. In long-term relationships ... we are called upon to navigate that delicate balance between separateness and connectedness ... we confront the challenge of sustaining both
without losing either.

Harriet Lerner

#50. We all feel a separateness; we wish that a drop of water would soften our ego; the world needs a common conscience: agreement ... we must concentrate outside ourselves.

Mark Tobey

#51. Self-preservation is the fundamental motive of the passions, according to Spinoza; but self-preservation alters its character when we realize that what is real and positive in us is what unites us to the whole, and not what preserves the appearance of separateness.

Anonymous

#52. To be just meaans to recognize the other as other; it means to give acknowledgment even where one cannot love ... A just man is just, therefore, because he sanctions another person in his very separateness and helps him to receive his due.

Josef Pieper

#53. The aim of my teaching is enlightenment, awakening from the dream state of separateness into the reality of the One. In short, my teaching is focused on realizing what you are.

Adyashanti

#54. How should a man caught in this net of routine not forget that he is a man, a unique individual, one who is given only this one chance of living, with hopes and disappointments, with sorrow and fear, with the longing for love and the dread of the nothing and of separateness?

Erich Fromm

#55. The term "teenager" had not long been invented, and it never occured to him that the separateness he felt, which was both painful and delicious, could be shared by anyone else.

Ian McEwan

#56. As from a star I saw, coldly and soberly, the separateness of everything. I felt the wall of my skin; I am I. That stone is a stone. My beautiful fusion with the things of this world was over.

Sylvia Plath

#57. Until the fear of separation is faced there can be only a life of illusion, where nothing real can exist. Until this happens there can be no knowing the stillness of peace, which is to change, in the very near future, for all humanity. The illusion of separateness can not continue to exist.

Donna Guillemette

#58. I hope that my painting has the impact of giving someone, as it did me, the feeling of his own totality, of his own separateness, of his own individuality.

Barnett Newman

#59. Meina Gladstone sat at the head of the long table and felt the peculiar and not-unpleasant sense of separateness which comes from far too little sleep over far too long a period.

Dan Simmons

#60. Either melt by devotion the sense of separateness, or burn it by knowledge-for what is it that melts or burns? Only that which by its nature can be melted or burnt; namely the idea that something other than your Self exists. What will happen then? You come to know your Self.

Anandamayi Ma

#61. You obtain God only when you get rid of the notion of separateness from God.

Gurumayi Chidvilasananda

#62. I open myself genuinely to all people by being willing to fully communicate my deepest feelings, since hiding in any degree keep me stuck in my illusion of separateness from other people.

Ken Keyes Jr.

#63. Moreover, the genuine lover always respects and even encourages this separateness and the unique individuality of the beloved. Failure to perceive and respect this separateness is extremely common, however, and the cause of much mental illness and unnecessary suffering.

M. Scott Peck

#64. Is there any greater mystery than the separateness of each person?

Laura Van Den Berg

#65. In separateness only does love learn definition.

Robert Penn Warren

#66. The two persons, longing, as all individuals do, to overcome the separateness and isolation to which we all are heir as individuals, can participate in a relationship that, for the moment, is not made up of two isolated, individual experiences, but a genuine union.

Rollo May

#67. The telling and hearing of stories is a bonding ritual that breaks through illusions of separateness and activates a deep sense of our collective interdependence.

Annette Simmons

#68. The importance of awakening to our evolutionary origins is paramount because irrational ideas about "who we are" fuel our sense of separateness

Christopher Zzenn Loren

#69. The meaning of our self is not to be found in its separateness from God and others, but in the ceaseless realization of yoga, of union; not on the side of the canvas where it is blank, but on the side where the picture is being painted.

Rabindranath Tagore

#70. Here we have the paradox, the potentially tragic paradox, that our relatedness to others is an essential aspect of our being, as is our separateness, but any particular person is not a necessary part of our being.

R.D. Laing

#71. The best things and best people rise out of their separateness; I'm against a homogenized society because I want the cream to rise.

Robert Frost

#72. I had not the heart to tell her that great love stories told of the pain and separateness between men and women.

Edna O'Brien

#73. As we increasingly become aware of the One Life breathing in each brother form of life, we learn the meaning of compassion, which literally means to 'suffer with' ... How does [the] self cause the desire which causes suffering? ... by the illusion of separateness, the unawareness of One.

Christmas Humphreys

#74. What we recognize as Life is actually a premise that enforces the belief of the separateness from God.

Sufian Chaudhary

#75. I look forward confidently to the day when all who work for a living will be one with no thought to their separateness as Negroes, Jews, Italians or any other distinctions. This will be the day when we bring into full realization the American dream
a dream yet unfulfilled.

Martin Luther King Jr.

#76. This life of separateness may be compared to a dream, a phantasm, a bubble, a shadow, a drop of dew, a flash of lightning.

Gautama Buddha

#77. When one isn't dominated by feelings of separateness from what he's working on, then one can be said to "care" about what he's doing. That is what caring really is, a feeling of identification with what one's doing.

Robert M. Pirsig

#78. As we grow in our consciousness, there will be more compassion and more love, and then the barriers between people, between religions, between nations will begin to fall. Yes, we have to beat down the separateness.

Ram Dass

#79. The experience of separateness arouses anxiety; it is, indeed, the source of all anxiety.

Erich Fromm

#80. How to explain Time and Separateness back to God, Who had never thought of them, Who could let the whole world come to grief in a scattering moment?

Eudora Welty

#81. This is the way it is with me, always looking in or looking out, a chilly pane of glass between me and a remote and longed-for world.

John Banville

#82. So what do you want? Does what happens inside show on the outside? There is such a great fire in one's soul, and yet nobody ever comes to warm themselves there, and passersby see nothing but a little smoke coming from the top of the chimney, and go on their way.

Vincent Van Gogh

#83. Never join two things that would be happier apart.

Marty Rubin

#84. I must know, he thinks. It must be clear to me. There is a world which is closed to him, a world of shadings, gradations, nuances, and subtleties. He is a genius and yet he is too explicit. June slips between his fingers. You cannot posses without loving.

Anais Nin