Sam Keen

The telling of your stories is a revolutionary act.

— Sam Keen

“Whoever authors your story authorizes your actions.”

— Sam Keen

Trust what moves you most deeply.

— Sam Keen

Deep summer is when laziness finds respectability.

— Sam Keen

“Freedom is an inside job.”

— Sam Keen

What happens if I try to build a life dedicated to avoiding all danger and all unnecessary risk?

— Sam Keen

What shapes our lives are the questions we ask, refuse to ask, or never think to ask.

— Sam Keen

There has always been a part of me that saw wilderness and risk-taking as the path to freedom.

— Sam Keen

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

— Sam Keen

To love is to return to a home we never left, to remember who we are.

— Sam Keen

You don't go through a deep personal transformation without some kind of dark night of the soul.

— Sam Keen

We learn to fly not by being fearless, but by the daily practice of courage.

— Sam Keen

We now realize that we're not living in a piecemeal world, but a world where everything is linked together.

— Sam Keen

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

— Sam Keen

The spiritual mind is always metaphorical. Spiritual thinking is poetic thinking. It's always trying to put a very diaphanous experience into words,…

— Sam Keen

Compassion begins with the acknowledgment of the single inescapable truth that is the foundation for the possibility of love between human beings…

— Sam Keen

Being pretty successful, I can, of course, afford some luxuries. But I realize again and again how we have to disillusion ourselves…

— Sam Keen

We suffer from the illusion that the faster we run, the more likely we are to grasp happiness. The truth is that…

— Sam Keen

I try to steer away from high metaphysical belief because I think we humans do best when we realize that we don't…

— Sam Keen

“To cultivate love, or whole-soul-fulness, we must resist the temptation to be upwardly mobile, to be always on the move, to pull…

— Sam Keen

“Without knowing how to calculate the odds on such matters, it seems improbably to me that God would have whispered the meaning…

— Sam Keen

Aristotle said that philosophy begins in wonder. I believe it also ends in wonder. The ultimate way in which we relate to…

— Sam Keen

To a large extent, the aged in our society are ghettoized. Old people are seen as useless, bypassed by history, old-fashioned, in…

— Sam Keen

There is a saying in Bali: "We have no art. We do everything as beautifully as possible." This reflects my philosophy of…

— Sam Keen

Wise people are able to give themselves gracefully to seemingly contradictory experiences, because they know that they belong to different seasons of…

— Sam Keen

Without reverence we [people] will gradually descend into ecocide. In the degree that the imperatives of the market - the temple of…

— Sam Keen

“A man who does not know how to wage a just battle, first with himself and then with others, has no values…

— Sam Keen

Mystical experiences (unlike scientific conclusions) cannot be communicated from one person to another. Philosophers and little children are continually amazed that we,…

— Sam Keen

Paranoia reduces anxiety and guilt by transferring to the other all the characteristics one does not want to recognize in oneself. It…

— Sam Keen

“Many people wake up in middle age with the realization that in their youthful romances and early marriages, they were drawn to…

— Sam Keen

The spiritual journey is one that we must take "alone together," in the same way that a good marriage involves a dance…

— Sam Keen

In a way, human beings have never been part of the natural order; we're not biological in the normal sense. Normal biological…

— Sam Keen

“Our inner dialogue is frequently composed of old tape loops that we run again and again... The normal personality marshals sufficient defense…

— Sam Keen

“The psyche cannot tolerate a vacuum of love. In the severely abused or deprived child, pain, dis-ease, and violance rush in to…

— Sam Keen

There is no easy formula for determining right and wrong livelihood, but it is essential to keep the question alive. To return…

— Sam Keen

On the pilgrim's path each man must become Moses, going on a vision quest to some mountaintop and returning with the ten…

— Sam Keen

We all yearn to fly. We are creatures of longing. We do not need to [physically fly] to be airborne. What I…

— Sam Keen

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

— Sam Keen

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

— Sam Keen

We can only choose whether we will feel and not what we will feel.

— Sam Keen