Sam Keen > Quotes

“We come to love not by finding a perfect person, but by learning to see an imperfect person perfectly.”
― Sam Keen, To Love and Be Loved

“There are two questions a man must ask himself: The first is 'Where am I going?' and the second is 'Who will go with me?'

If you ever get these questions in the wrong order you are in trouble.”
― Sam Keen, Fire in the Belly: On Being a Man

“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, Fire in the Belly: On Being a Man

“The psyche cannot tolerate a vacuum of love. In the severely abused or deprived child, pain, dis-ease, and violance rush in to fill the void. In the average person in our culture, who has been only "normally" deprived of touch, anxiety and an insatiable hunger for posessions replace the missing eros. The child lacking a sense of welcome, joyous belonging, gratuitous security, will learn to hoard the limited supply of affection. According to the law of psychic compensation, not being held leads to holding on, grasping, addiction, posessiveness. Gradually, things replace people as a source of pleasure and security. When the gift of belonging with is denied, the child learns that love means belongin to. To the degree we are arrested at this stage of development, the needy child will dominate our motivations. Other people and things (and there is fundamentally no difference) will be seen as existing solely for the purpose of "my" survival and satisfaction. "Mine" will become the most important word.”
― Sam Keen, The Passionate Life: Stages of Loving

“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, Fire in the Belly: On Being a Man

“Deep summer is when laziness finds respectability.”
― Sam Keen

“...one part of love is sweet and easy, something we fall into and are swept away by. But the other part is hard: it requires discipline, willpower, and opening your heart again and again to someone with whom you are angry, can't stand, and do not like.”
― Sam Keen, Hymns to an Unknown God: Awakening The Spirit In Everyday Life

“Trust what moves you most deeply.”
― Sam Keen

“The root of humanly caused evil is not man's animal nature, not territorial aggression, or innate selfishness, but our need to gain self-esteem, deny our mortality, and achieve a heroic self-image. Our desire for the best is the cause of the worst.”
― Sam Keen, The Denial of Death

“Love isn't finding a perfect person. It's seeing an imperfect person perfectly.”
― Sam Keen

“Freedom is an inside job.”
― Sam Keen, Hymns To An Unknown God : Awakening The Spirit In Everyday Life

“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, To Love and Be Loved

“We can only choose whether we will feel and not what we will feel.”
― Sam Keen, Inward Bound: Exploring the Geography of Your Emotions

“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, Fire in the Belly: On Being a Man

“Soul grows in communion. Word by word, story by story, for better or worse, we build our world. From true conversation - speaking and listening - communication deepens into compassion and creates community.”
― Sam Keen, Hymns to an Unknown God: Awakening The Spirit In Everyday Life

“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

“Many people wake up in middle age with the realization that in their youthful romances and early marriages, they were drawn to precisely the kinds of partners they were trying to avoid. All too often we marry stand-ins for our alchoholic fathers, shadowy replacements for our angry mothers, surrogates with whom we try to work out our unfinished childhood dramas. Or we fall in love with someone who incarnates the virtues or vices opposite our own. An orderly man who plans his days marries a spontaneous woman who lets things lie where they fall, lives in the moment, and is perpetually late for appointments.”
― Sam Keen, To Love and Be Loved

“I try to steer away from high metaphysical belief because I think we humans do best when we realize that we don't know all that much.”
― 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

“To cultivate love, or whole-soul-fulness, we must resist the temptation to be upwardly mobile, to be always on the move, to pull up our roots and fly to the mythic kingdom of Elsewhere.”
― Sam Keen, To Love and Be Loved

“To sustain love, a man and a woman must continually be marrying and divorcing, moving with, against, away from, and beyond each other, saying 'yes' and 'no'.”
― Sam Keen, The Passionate Life: Stages of Loving

“Our inner dialogue is frequently composed of old tape loops that we run again and again... The normal personality marshals sufficient defense mechanisms to exclude dangerous and unknown stimuli and just enough windows to let in an occasional wandering minstrel. Neurotic identity crises come when our defense mechanisms have been too successful and we're encapsulated in the fortress we have constructed with nothing to refresh us in our solitary confinement. So we play the old movies with their stale fears and their unrealistic hopes until we become bored enough to risk disarmament and engagement. ”
― Sam Keen, Inward Bound: Exploring the Geography of Your Emotions

“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

“Whoever authors your story authorizes your actions.”
― Sam Keen

“You come to love not by finding the perfect person, but by learning to see an imperfect person perfectly.”
― Sam Keen

“A man who does not know how to wage a just battle, first with himself and then with others, has no values worth defending, no ideals worth aspiring to, no awareness of the disease of which he might be healed. And no mensch worships the status quo.”
― Sam Keen, Fire in the Belly: On Being a Man

“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

“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, Hymns To An Unknown God : Awakening The Spirit In Everyday Life

“In problems of logic, contradictory statements cannot be true; in the psyche, only contradictions are true. Self-image and shadow are Siamese twins, and the psyche is equally formed by the conscious and unconscious. Whatever appears to be true on the surface is linked to an opposite truth beneath the surface. What you see is not what you get.”
― Sam Keen, Fire in the Belly: On Being a Man