Inner Life Quotes - Page 9

• Experiences, much more than instruction, are a seeing with the inner eye - finding a channel to our essential inner life, a door to our deepest understanding wherein we have the capacity for universal response.

  Lawren Harris

  Eye, Doors, Understanding

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• If we would accept heaven's life, we need by all means to live in the world and to participate in its duties and affairs. In this way, we accept a spiritual life by means of our moral and civic life; and there is no other way a spiritual life can be formed within us, no other way our spirits can be prepared for heaven. This is because living an inner life and not an outer life at the same time is like living in a house that has no foundation, that gradually either settles or develops gaping cracks or totters until it collapses.

  Emanuel Swedenborg

  Spiritual, Mean, Heaven

  Emanuel Swedenborg (2000). “Heaven and Hell”, Chrysalis Books

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• All my novels are very much directly related to my inner life, even though I'm inventing characters, even though it's fiction, even though it's make-believe, it nevertheless is coming out of the deepest recesses of myself.

  Paul Auster

  Believe, Character, Fiction

  Interview with Austin Allen, bigthink.com. November 5, 2009.

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• When a book's pattern and the shape of its inner life is as plain to the reader as it is to the author -- then perhaps it is time to throw the book aside, as having had its day, and start again on something new.

  Doris Lessing

  Book, Shapes, Patterns

  Doris Lessing (2012). “The Golden Notebook”, p.21, HarperCollins UK

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• Poetry is one of the ancient arts, and it began, as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth. Also, it began through the process of seeing, and feeling, and hearing, and smelling, and touching, and then remembering--I mean remembering in words--what these perceptual experiences were like, while trying to describe the endless invisible fears and desires of our inner lives.

  Mary Oliver

  Art, Mean, Poetry

  Mary Oliver (1994). “A Poetry Handbook”, p.106, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• To feel the meaning of what one is doing, and to rejoice in that meaning; to unite in one concurrent fact the unfolding of the inner life and the ordered development of material conditions--that is art.

  John Dewey

  Art, Development, Facts

  John Dewey (1977). “The Middle Works, 1899-1924”, p.292, SIU Press

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• Truth, acceptance of the truth, is a shattering experience. It shatters the binding shroud of culture trance. It rips apart smugness, arrogance, superiority, and self-importance. It requires acknowledgment of responsibility for the nature and quality of each of our own lives, our own inner lives as well as the life of the world. Truth, inwardly accepted, humbling truth, makes one vulnerable. You can't be right, self-righteous, and truthful at the same time.

  Paula Gunn Allen

  Truth, Rip, Responsibility

  Paula Gunn Allen (1998). “Off the Reservation: Reflections on Boundary-busting Border-crossing Loose Canons”, Boston, Mass. : Beacon Press

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• There were really funny characteristics about this guy [Richard Nixon], chief of which would be that he seemed to devote about 85 percent of his waking energy to suppressing any sign of his emotional response to anything that was going on around him, and the other 15 percent blurting out those authentic responses in the silliest and most inopportune ways. And he had these smiles that would come at the most inappropriate times - just flashes that there was an inner life screaming to get out.

  Harry Shearer

  Emotional, Guy, Would Be

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• I would guess that the typical profile of a 'follower' is someone who is young and who feels marginalised, empty and pointless. They don't have an inner life.

  Oliver James

  Typical, Followers, Empty

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• To a greater or lesser extent there goes on in every person a struggle between two forces: the longing for privacy and the urge to go places: the introversion, interest directed within oneself toward one's own inner life of vigorous thought and fancy; and extroversion, interest directed outward, toward the external world of people and tangible values.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Struggle, Journey, Two

  Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov, Fredson Bowers (1981). “Lectures on Russian literature”, Harcourt

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• Before entering the seminary, I had not encountered the life-changing potential of reading as a source of meaning, as a way of ordering one's inner life, and being rooted in the world.

  James Carroll

  Life Changing, Book, Reading

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• Conventional nudes based on classical originals could bear no burden of thought or inner life without losing their formal completeness.

  Kenneth Clark

  Bears, Losing, Burden

  "The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form" by Kenneth Clark, (Ch. VIII), 1951.

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• The theater let me dramatize inner struggles, the push-pull between the inner life and the world, the various selves I presented according to what each world required. And it let me use my body.

  Margo Jefferson

  Struggle, Self, Use

  Source: www.elle.com

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• The genius of religions is that they structure the inner life.

  Alain de Botton

  Genius, Structure

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• I hope that people who don't live with animals will appreciate that each animal is a unique individual with a rich inner life.

  Linda Hoaglund

  Animal, Unique, People

  Source: blogs.indiewire.com

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• The role of humankind is to use the cultural and social environment it has created to devise new global values.... Human relations with nature are intimately bound up in interpersonal relations and with the relation of the self and its inner life.

  Daisaku Ikeda

  Self, Roles, Use

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• Suppose you stand on a high place to enjoy the beauty of the sparkling sea below. You need do nothing to create that beauty; you need only BE IN THE SAME PLACE WHERE IT IS, and let nature do the rest. So it is with the inner life. There is nothing we can DO to gain psychic beauty. It already exists without our effort. We need only be where we belong, that is, in self-union. Then, beauty IS.

  Vernon Howard

  Self, Sea, Psychics

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• That which is easy is bad for your inner life.

  G. I. Gurdjieff

  Easy

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• 'Biblical worldview'. The term means literally a 'view of the world', a biblically informed perspective on all of reality. A worldview is like a mental map that tells you how to navigate the world effectively. It is the imprint of God's objective truth on our inner life.

  Nancy Pearcey

  Mean, Biblical, Reality

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• There is not a place to which the Christian can withdraw from the world, whether it be outwardly or in the sphere of the inner life. Any attempt to escape from the world must sooner or later be paid for with a sinful surrender to the world.

  Dietrich Bonhoeffer

  Christian, Spheres, World

  Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1965). “Ethics”

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• Standing on soil feels so much different than standing on city pavement; it lets you look inward and reflect and see who you really are, while you see a beautiful, unspoiled land as far as the eye can see. It allows your inner life to grow

  Ricardo Montalban

  Beautiful, Eye, Land

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• Flow is the process of achieving happiness through control over one's inner life. The optimal state of inner experience is order in consciousness. This happens when we focus our attention (psychic energy) on realistic goals and when our skills match the challenges we face.

  Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

  Order, Psychics, Skills

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• As we unfold spiritually, the reality of our inner life enters new dimensions and we must change with it.

  Harold Klemp

  Reality, Dimensions

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• The profound political changes we need in order to heal our planet will not come about through fragmented problem solving or intellectual analyses that overlook the deepest yearnings and intuitions of the heart....As we begin to cultivate a rich inner life and experience our connection with all life, we realize how little of what society tells us we need is actually important for our well-being....Green politics must address the spiritual vacuum of industrial society.

  Petra Kelly

  Spiritual, Heart, Order

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• If we grow wiser and more learned in our intercourse with wise and learned persons, how much more will we gain in our inner life by communing with God in prayer.

  Huldrych Zwingli

  Wise, Prayer, Learned Person

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