Sam Keen Quotes

“We come to love not by finding a perfect person, but by learning to see an imperfect person perfectly.”

— Sam Keen

“Good men and good women have fire in the belly. We are fierce. Don't mess with us if you're looking for someone who will always be 'nice' to you. Nice gets you a C+ in life. We don't always smile, talk in a soft voice, or engage in indiscriminate hugs. In the loving struggle between the sexes we thrust and parry.”

— Sam Keen

“Burnout is nature's way of telling you, you've been going through the motions your soul has departed; you're a zombie, a member of the walking dead, a sleepwalker. False optimism is like administrating stimulants to an exhausted nervous system.”

— Sam Keen

Deep summer is when laziness finds respectability.

— Sam Keen

Love isn't finding a perfect person. It's seeing an imperfect person perfectly.

— Sam Keen

The sacred is discovered in what moves and touches us, in what makes us tremble.

— Sam Keen

“The traditional gender ideals of the strong-silent man who plays his cards close to his chest and the mysterious woman who disguises her feelings with coyness go so far as to make a virtue of being unavailable and secretive. But wholehearted intimacy can develop only where two people are equally forthcoming and self-revelatory. To take the risk of loving, we must become vulnerable enough to test the radical proposition that knowledge of another and self-revelation will ultimately increase rather than decrease love. It is an awe-ful risk.”

— Sam Keen

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

— Sam Keen

“Freedom is an inside job.”

— Sam Keen

“There is no easy formula for determining right and wrong livelihood, but it is essential to keep the question alive. To return the sense of dignity and honor to manhood, we have to stop pretending that we can make a living at something that is trivial or destructive and still have sense of legitimate self-worth. A society in which vocation and job are separated for most people gradually creates an economy that is often devoid of spirit, one that frequently fills our pocketbooks at the cost of emptying our souls.”

— Sam Keen

“Chronological time is what we measure by clocks and calendars; it is always linear, orderly, quantifiable, and mechanical. Kairotic time is organic, rhythmic, bodily, leisurely, and aperiodic; it is the inner cadence that brings fruit to ripeness, a woman to childbirth, a man to change the direction of his life.”

— Sam Keen

“Each day befriend a single fear, and the miscellaneous terrors of being human will never join together to form such a morass of vague anxiety that it rules your life from the shadows of the unconscious. We learn to fly not by being fearless, but by the daily practice of courage.”

— Sam Keen

“In a pluralistic culture ... every individual must create a private mythological system. I must discover within myself the Garden of Eden from which I am exiled and the New Jeruselem toward which I am journeying. And must bear the burden of being my own redeemer, my own Christ.”

— Sam Keen

“Without knowing how to calculate the odds on such matters, it seems improbably to me that God would have whispered the meaning of my life into the ear of some guru or authority.”

— Sam Keen

“Condition a man (or a woman) to value aggression above all other virtues, and you will produce a character type whose most readily expressed emotion will be anger. Condition a woman (or a man) to value submission above all other attitudes and you will produce a character type whose most readily expressed emotion will be sadness.”

— Sam Keen

“The question that surrounds lovemaking is, "Did you cum?" and the unasked question beneath that is, "Am I all right?”

— Sam Keen

“The world is run largely by urban, sedentary males. The symbol of power is the chair.”

— Sam Keen

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

— Sam Keen

Our society has been eaten up by the economic view of things, which routinely forces us to work at jobs that don't mean anything.

— Sam Keen

“Compassion begins with the acknowledgment of the single inescapable truth that is the foundation for the possibility of love between human beings - an awareness of the tragic sense of life.”

— Sam Keen

“In the degree that we remember and retell our stories and create new ones we become the authors, the authorities, of our own lives.”

— Sam Keen

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

“The lover heals the world not by a vague and abstract love for everybody and everything, but by becoming passionate and vowing fidelity to concrete relationships, persons, institutions, and places.”

— Sam Keen

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

— Sam Keen

“Enter each day with the expectation that the happenings of the day may contain a clandestine message addressed to you personally. Expect omens, epiphanies, casual blessings and teachers who unknowingly speak to your condition.”

— Sam Keen

“Call it "womb awe" or even "womb worship" but it's not simple envy. I don't remember even wanting to be a woman. But each of the three times I have been present at the birth of one of my children, I have been overwhelmed by a sense of reverence ... It was quite suddenly, the first day of creation; the Goddess giving birth to a world ... Like men since the beginning of time I wondered: What can I ever create that will equal the magnificence of this new life?”

— Sam Keen

“I suspect that we are all recipients of cosmic love notes. Messages, omens, voices, cries, revelations, and appeals are homogenized into each day's events. If only we knew how to listen, to read the signs.”

— Sam Keen

“We suffer from the illusion that the faster we run, the more likely we are to grasp happiness. The truth is that the velocity necessary for success rarely exceeds the rate of reflection.”

— Sam Keen

“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

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

“Myth is the system of basic metaphors, images, and stories that informs the perceptions, memories, and aspirations of a people; provides the rationale for its institutions, rituals and power structure; and gives a map of the purpose and stages of life.”

— 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 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

In the beginning, we create the enemy. Before the weapon comes the image. We think others to death and then invent the battle-axe or ballistic missiles with which to actually kill them. Propaganda precedes technology.

— Sam Keen

“Mounting an expedition to actualize a Compassionate Commonwealth of all peoples ... is the great spiritual challenge of our time.”

— Sam Keen

“If we had a better understanding of the ways we think about enemies, we might be able to think of more rational ways of settling conflict.”

— Sam Keen

“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

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

— 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, realizing all the while that words are inadequate.”

— Sam Keen

Paranoia reduces anxiety and guilt by transferring to the other all the characteristics one does not want to recognize in oneself. It is maintained by selective perception and recall. We only see and acknowledge those negative aspects of the enemy that support the stereotype we have already created.

— Sam Keen

“The 'still, small voice' of God never calls on me to be like another man. It appeals to me to rise to my full stature and fulfill the promise that sleeps within my being.”

— Sam Keen

If some incarnation of evil as unambiguous as Hitler appeared again, I would have no moral qualms about killing the enemy. But in the modern world of moral murkiness, I prefer to keep my hands as clean of enemy blood as possible.

— Sam Keen

“I think that critiquing the myths of our society and helping people find their way through them is a very important thing. It's a theme that goes through all of my work.”

— Sam Keen

“It's interesting that the worse things get, the more we believe the next technological fix is going to get us out of it. But it's like being in quicksand: the more you struggle the deeper you sink.”

— Sam Keen

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

— Sam Keen

“There is the extreme of hopelessness and the inevitability of doom, a deep despair that comes from the sense that our industrial, consuming society is jeopardizing the planet.”

— Sam Keen

“Throughout my life, I've had different metaphors for freedom. At one time, it was skin diving. In the ocean you feel weightless; you escape from gravity.”

— Sam Keen

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

— Sam Keen

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

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

— Sam Keen

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