Latest Sam Keen Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• 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

  World, Want, Realizing

  Source: www.spiritualityandpractice.com

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

  Sam Keen

  Fall, Kind, Forget

  Source: www.spiritualityandpractice.com

• 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

  People, Fleeting, May

  Source: www.spiritualityandpractice.com

• 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

  Children, Mystical Experiences, World

  Source: www.spiritualityandpractice.com

• Without reverence we [people] will gradually descend into ecocide. In the degree that the imperatives of the market - the temple of the Mall - govern our lives, we are in escalating danger of destroying the commonwealth of all sentient beings - bugs and bees and buntings - on which we depend for a luxurious life on planet earth.

  Sam Keen

  People, Bunting, Degrees

  Source: www.spiritualityandpractice.com

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

  Sam Keen

  Best Practices, Advice, Railroads

  Source: www.spiritualityandpractice.com

• 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

  Art, Philosophy, Practice

  Interview with Frederic Brussat, www.spiritualityandpractice.com.

• The major impediment to experiencing the sacred depths of ordinary moments is the speed and distraction of contemporary life that moves to the imperatives of the global economic order.In addition, we increasingly live in a virtual world in which our reality is filtered through media and information technology.

  Sam Keen

  Moving, Technology, Reality

  Source: www.spiritualityandpractice.com

• I think we have to trust ourselves in the darkness of not knowing. The God out of which we came and into which we go is an unknown God. It's the luminosity of that darkness and that unknowing that is, I think, the most human - and the most sacred - place of all.

  Sam Keen

  Thinking, Knowing, Darkness

  Source: www.scottlondon.com

• To a large extent, the aged in our society are ghettoized. Old people are seen as useless, bypassed by history, old-fashioned, in the way. So, not surprisingly, when we reach the official mark of old age, we're supposed to go gently into that good night, to get off center stage and hand over the spotlight. Old age is also surrounded by shame - the myth of impotence and inability.

  Sam Keen

  Good Night, Hands, People

  Source: www.scottlondon.com

• 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

  Spiritual, Thinking, Always Trying

  Source: www.scottlondon.com

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

  Sam Keen

  Answers, Illusion, Loses

  Source: www.scottlondon.com

• 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

  Religious, Order, Parent

  Source: www.scottlondon.com

• 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

  Culture, Who We Are, Good Family

  Source: www.scottlondon.com

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

  Sam Keen

  Thinking, Self, Darkness

  Source: www.scottlondon.com

• 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

  Real, Successful, Ideas

  Source: www.scottlondon.com

• 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

  Religious, Real, World

  Source: www.scottlondon.com

• 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

  Dark, Night, Thinking

  Source: www.scottlondon.com

• 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

  Thinking, Mysterious, Mystery

  Source: www.scottlondon.com

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

  Sam Keen

  Mystery, Wells, Knows

  Source: www.scottlondon.com

• I've spent my life cultivating knowledge of myself. But the more I know myself, the more utterly mysterious I become.

  Sam Keen

  Mysterious, Knows, Cultivating

  Source: www.scottlondon.com

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

  Sam Keen

  Stories, Intertwined, Persons

  Source: www.scottlondon.com

• 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

  Thinking, Giving, Focus

  Source: www.scottlondon.com

• 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

  Jobs, Real, Long

  Source: www.scottlondon.com

• Aristotle said that philosophy begins in wonder. I believe it also ends in wonder. The ultimate way in which we relate to the world as something sacred is by renewing our sense of wonder. That's why I'm so opposed to the kind of miracle-mongering we find in both new-age and old-age religion. We're attracted to pseudomiracles only because we've ceased to wonder at the world, at how amazing it is.

  Sam Keen

  Philosophy, Believe, Miracle

  Source: www.scottlondon.com