Inner Life Quotes - Page 7

• I was very academically inclined. But my inner life was in such turmoil. I'd go home and my home life was so miserable that it just felt like I was doing everything that I was supposed to do. I did all my chores, made really good grades, and I was excelling at school, but I wasn't happy.

  Sonja Sohn

  Home, School, Miserable

  "Sonja Sohn ReWires Baltimore". Interview with Elizabeth Gettelman, www.motherjones.com. March 15, 2012.

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• Joshua chose the simple life ... because it gave him the freedom to expand the breadth of his inner life.

  Joseph Girzone

  Simple, Simplicity, Breadth

  Joseph F. Girzone (1997). “Joshua, the Journey Home: Includes Joshua, Joshua and the Children and Joshua in the Holy Land”, Arrowood Press

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• Love: the skillful audacity required to share an inner life.

  Gertrude Stein

  Audacity, Share, Skillful

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• The relative ease of most driving lures us into thinking we can get away with doing other things. Indeed, those other things, like listening to the radio, can help when driving itself is threatening to cause fatigue. But we buy into the myth of multitasking with little actual knowledge of how much we can really add in or, as with the television news, how much we are missing. As the inner life of the driver begins to come into focus, it is becoming clear not only that distraction is the single biggest problem on the road but that we have little concept of just how distracted we are.

  Tom Vanderbilt

  Thinking, Focus, Missing

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• The creative person finds himself in a state of turmoil, restlessness, emptiness, and unbearable frustration unless he expresses his inner life in some creative way.

  Silvano Arieti

  Frustration, Creative, Unbearable

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• Men who have a tempestuous inner life and do not seek to give vent to it by talking or writing are simply men who have no tempestuous inner life. Give company to a lonely man and he will talk more than anyone.

  Cesare Pavese

  Lonely, Writing, Men

  Cesare Pavese, Alma Elizabeth Murch (1961). “This Business of Living”, p.101, Transaction Publishers

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• Are you going to be just kind of a walking monument to a job, or are you going to have some kind of really significant inner life of your own? Because the external things the job, the house, the this, the that do not really fill the place inside.

  Robertson Davies

  Jobs, House, Kind

  Robertson Davies, J. Madison Davis (1989). “Conversations with Robertson Davies”, p.231, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• The constructive schizoid person stands against the spiritual emptiness of encroaching technology and does not let himself be emptied by it. He lives and works with the machine without becoming a machine. He finds it necessary to remain detached enough to get meaning from the experience, but in doing so, to protect his own inner life from impoverishment.

  Rollo May

  Spiritual, Technology, Becoming

  Rollo May (1969). “Love and will”

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• In [The New Poetry] I had attacked the British poets' nervous preference for gentility above all else, and their avoidance of the uncomfortable, destructive truths both of the inner life and of the present time.

  Al Alvarez

  Nervous, Poet, British

  Al Alvarez (2013). “The Savage God: A Study of Suicide”, p.40, Bloomsbury Publishing

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• The realm of superstitions, fortune-telling, presentiments, intuition, dreams, all this is the inner life of a human being, and all this is the hardest thing to film.

  Krzysztof Kieslowski

  Dream, Intuition, Superstitions

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• One always, sooner or later, comes upon a city which is an image of one's inner cities. Fez is an image of my inner self. ... The layers of the city of Fez are like the layers and secrecies of the inner life. One needs a guide. ... There were in Fez, as in my life, streets which led nowhere, impasses which remained a mystery.

  Anais Nin

  Self, Cities, Needs

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• Poetry is the inner life of a culture, its nervous system, its deepest way of imagining the world. A culture that ignores its poets, chokes off its nervous system and becomes mortally ill.

  Erica Jong

  Culture, World, Way

  Erica Jong (2006). “Fear of Fifty”, p.97, Penguin

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• The literature of the inner life is very largely a record of struggle with the inordinate passions of the social self.

  Charles Horton Cooley

  Struggle, Passion, Self

  Charles Horton Cooley (1964). “Human Nature and the Social Order”, p.248, Transaction Publishers

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• If your inner life is not producing what you would like on the outside, don't be discouraged... just be willing to change.

  Joyce Meyer

  Life Is, Discouraged, Willing To Change

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• I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident. Not one of them writes elegant first drafts. All right, one of them does, but we do not like her very much. We do not think that she has a rich inner life or that God likes her or can even stand her. (Although when I mentioned this to my priest friend Tom, he said that you can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.)

  Anne Lamott

  Hate, Writing, Thinking

  "Bird by Bird". Book by Anne Lamott, 1994.

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• Do not erase the designs the child makes in the soft wax of his inner life.

  Maria Montessori

  Children, Design, Erase

  Maria Montessori (1970). “The child in the family”, Contemporary Books

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• Teaching, like any truly human activity, emerges from one's inwardness, for better or worse. As I teach I project the condition of my soul onto my students, my subject, and our way of being together. The entanglements I experience in the classroom are often no more or less than the convolutions of my inner life. Viewed from this angle, teaching holds a mirror to the soul. If I am willing to look in that mirror and not run from what I see, I have a chance to gain self-knowledge-and knowing myself is as crucial to good teaching as knowing my students and my subject.

  Parker J. Palmer

  Running, Educational, Teaching

  Parker J. Palmer, Megan Scribner (2007). “The Courage to Teach Guide for Reflection and Renewal”, p.102, John Wiley & Sons

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• The advance of scientific knowledge does not seem to make either our universe or our inner life in it any less mysterious.

  John B. S. Haldane

  Knowledge, Science, Doe

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• Most true happiness comes from one's inner life, from the disposition of the mind and soul. Admittedly, a good inner life is difficult to achieve, especially in these trying times. It takes reflection and contemplation and self-discipline.

  William L. Shirer

  Happiness, Reflection, Self

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• The Spirit has his own existence and personal function in the inner life of God and the economy of salvation: his task is to bring about the unity of the human race in the Body of Christ, but he also imparts to this unity a personal, and hence diversified, character.

  John Meyendorff

  Character, Race, Unity

  John Meyendorff (1981). “The Orthodox Church: Its Past and Its Role in the World Today”, p.178, St Vladimir's Seminary Press

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• As an experienced artist, I carry my work like a secret pregnancy. I am always aware of inner life and the need to protect it.

  Julia Cameron

  Art, Pregnancy, Secret

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• Meditation simplifies our outer life and energizes our inner life. Meditation gives us a natural and spontaneous life, a life that becomes so natural and spontaneous that we cannot breathe without being conscious of our own divinity.

  Sri Chinmoy

  Giving, Meditation, Divinity

  Sri Chinmoy (1997). “The Wings of Joy: Finding Your Path to Inner Peace”, p.28, Simon and Schuster

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• Art when inspired with love leads to higher realms, and that art will open for you the inner life.

  Meher Baba

  Art, Inspired, Realms

  "The Answer: Conversations with Meher Baba".

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• I wish that Christmas may be happy and heavenly, and the holidays glow with the gifts of the inner life that God will give to each one.

  Janet Erskine Stuart

  Holiday, Giving, Wish

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• A painter, who finds no satisfaction in mere representation, however artistic, in his longing to express his inner life, cannot but envy the ease with which music, the most non-material of the arts today, achieves this end. He naturally seeks to apply the methods of music to his own art.

  Wassily Kandinsky

  Inspiring, Art, Envy

  Wassily Kandinsky (2015). “Kandinsky”, p.59, Parkstone International

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