Best 69 quotes of Stephen Levine on MyQuotes

We are motivated more by aversion to the unpleasant than by a will toward truth, freedom, or healing. We are constantly attempting to escape our life, to avoid rather than enter our pain we, and we wonder why it is so difficult to be fully alive. (43)

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.

When the heart acknowledges how much pain there is in the mind, it turns like a mother toward a frightened child.

When we see all women as the divine mother and all men as the divine father, everyone you meet is sacred.

When we turn to our innate wisdom for the harmony of mind and gut, we heal the entrance to the heart as it seeks to beat in rhythm with the world.

When your fear touches someone’s pain, it becomes pity, when your love touches someone’s pain, it become compassion.

When your fear touches someone's pain it becomes pity; when your love touches someone's pain, it becomes compassion. To train in compassion, then, is to know all beings are the same and suffer in similar ways, to honor all those who suffer, and to know you are neither separate from nor superior to anyone.

Why do so many of us not give ourselves permission to be alive until we are absolutely assured that we will die? ...If we are not in [this present millisecond of life and conscious experience], we are not alive; we are merely thinking our lives. Yet we have seen so many die, looking back over their shoulders at their lives, shaking their heads and muttering in bewilderment, "What was that all about?

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.

You have to remember one life, one death–this one! To enter fully the day, the hour, the moment whether it appears as life or death, whether we catch it on the inbreath or outbreath, requires only a moment, this moment. And along with it all the mindfulness we can muster, and each stage of our ongoing birth, and the confident joy of our inherent luminosity. (24)

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.

[C]oncepts of dying in to a heaven or hell seem a good deal more political than spiritual. (124)

Death is perfectly safe. (55)

How soon will we accept this opportunity to be fully alive before we die? (88)

I have never lived a life so much larger than death. (93)

That which is impermanent attracts compassion. That which is not provides wisdom. (116)

The mind is a useful tool but not a very good friend.

We have allowed ourselves very little space for not-knowing. Very seldom do we have the wisdom not-to-know, to lay the mind open to deeper understanding. When confusion occurs in the mind, we identify with it and say we are confused…Confusion arises because we fight against our not-knowing, which experiences each moment afresh without preconceptions or expectations.

We see not just that which is uninjured, but that within us which is uninjurable.