emoyeni > emoyeni's Quotes

“I was going to die, sooner or later, whether or not I had even spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silences will not protect you.... What are the words you do not yet have? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence? We have been socialized to respect fear more than our own need for language."

I began to ask each time: "What's the worst that could happen to me if I tell this truth?" Unlike women in other countries, our breaking silence is unlikely to have us jailed, "disappeared" or run off the road at night. Our speaking out will irritate some people, get us called bitchy or hypersensitive and disrupt some dinner parties. And then our speaking out will permit other women to speak, until laws are changed and lives are saved and the world is altered forever.

Next time, ask: What's the worst that will happen? Then push yourself a little further than you dare. Once you start to speak, people will yell at you. They will interrupt you, put you down and suggest it's personal. And the world won't end.

And the speaking will get easier and easier. And you will find you have fallen in love with your own vision, which you may never have realized you had. And you will lose some friends and lovers, and realize you don't miss them. And new ones will find you and cherish you. And you will still flirt and paint your nails, dress up and party, because, as I think Emma Goldman said, "If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution." And at last you'll know with surpassing certainty that only one thing is more frightening than speaking your truth. And that is not speaking.”
― Audre Lorde

“and when we speak we are afraid
our words will not be heard
nor welcomed
but when we are silent
we are still afraid
So it is better to speak
remembering
we were never meant to survive”
― Audre Lorde, The Black Unicorn: Poems

“Guilt is not a response to anger; it is a response to one’s own actions or lack of action. If it leads to change then it can be useful, since it is then no longer guilt but the beginning of knowledge. Yet all too often, guilt is just another name for impotence, for defensiveness destructive of communication; it becomes a device to protect ignorance and the continuation of things the way they are, the ultimate protection for changelessness.”
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“I want to live the rest of my life, however long or short, with as much sweetness as I can decently manage, loving all the people I love, and doing as much as I can of the work I still have to do. I am going to write fire until it comes out of my ears, my eyes, my noseholes--everywhere. Until it's every breath I breathe. I'm going to go out like a fucking meteor!”
― Audre Lorde

“Pain is important: how we evade it, how we succumb to it, how we deal with it, how we transcend it.”
― Audre Lorde

“I am deliberate and afraid of nothing.”
― Audre Lorde

“When I hear modern people complain of being lonely then I know what has happened. They have lost the cosmos.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Apocalypse

“The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms, so you dredge that up. None of this is necessary. There will always be one more thing.”
― Toni Morrison

“For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. Racism and homophobia are real conditions of all our lives in this place and time. I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives here. See whose face it wears. Then the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices.”
― Audre Lorde

“Until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned, everywhere is war. And until there are no longer first-class and second-class citizens of any nation, until the colour of a man's skin is of no more significance than the colour of his eyes. And until the basic human rights are equally guaranteed to all without regard to race, there is war. And until that day, the dream of lasting peace, world citizenship, rule of international morality, will remain but a fleeting illusion to be pursued, but never attained... now everywhere is war.”

- Popularized by Bob Marley in the song War”
― Haile Selassie I, Selected Speeches

“Whoever debases others is debasing himself.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

“Don’t arrive at the end of this tale insisting it was too long or too wide or too unlike you. I am not interested in appealing to you. I am not you. I am only here to warn you.”
― Anakana Schofield, Bina: A Novel in Warnings

“Our highest endeavor must be to develop free human beings who are able of themselves to impart purpose and direction to their lives. The need for imagination, a sense of truth, and a feeling of responsibility—these three forces are the very nerve of education.”
― Rudolf Steiner

“Love starts when we push aside our ego and make room for someone else.”
― Rudolf Steiner

“Just as in the body, eye and ear develop as organs of perception, as senses for bodily processes, so does a man develop in himself soul and spiritual organs of perception through which the soul and spiritual worlds are opened to him. For those who do not have such higher senses, these worlds are dark and silent, just as the bodily world is dark and silent for a being without eyes and ears.”
― Rudolf Steiner, Theosophy: An Introduction to the Spiritual Processes in Human Life and in the Cosmos

“It cannot be repeated too often that this transformation does not alienate him from the world. He will in no way be estranged from his daily tasks and duties, for he comes to realize that the most insignificant action he has to accomplish, the most insignificant experience which offers itself to him, stands in connection with cosmic beings and cosmic events. When once this connection is revealed to him in his moments of contemplation, he comes to his daily activities with a new, fuller power. For now he knows that his labor and his suffering are given and endured for the sake of a great, spiritual, cosmic whole. Not weariness, but strength to live springs from meditation.”
― Rudolf Steiner, How to Know Higher Worlds

“We suffer because with every inner and outer suffering we eliminate one of our faults and become transformed into something better.”
― Rudolf Steiner, Anthroposophy in Everyday Life: Practical Training in Thought - Overcoming Nervousness - Facing Karma - The Four Temperaments

“Truthfulness, uprightness, and honesty are in this connection creative forces, while mendacity, deceitfulness, and dishonesty are destructive forces.”
― Rudolf Steiner, How to Know Higher Worlds

“A violinist had a violin, a painter his palette. All I had was myself. I was the instrument that I must care for.”
― Josephine Baker

“Quite simply, I’ve always been in love. For me, artists, a man or a woman, who doesn’t have a sense of seduction, the gift of love, faith in the mysterious rendezvous, is not an artist. Art, you know, is seduction, passion, the pursuit in its life in the most inspiring, most beautiful, sweetest things.”
― Josephine Baker, Fearless and Free: A Memoir

“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.”
― Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

“He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“It is very difficult also to sacrifice one's suffering. A man will renounce any pleasures you like but he will not give up his suffering.”
― G.I. Gurdjieff

“Awakening is possible only for those who seek it and want it, for those who are ready to struggle with themselves and work on themselves for a very long time and very persistently in order to attain it.”
― G.I. Gurdjieff

“There is an old saying that man only dares use his words for three purposes, to "heal, bless or prosper." What man says of others will be said of him, and what he wishes for another, he is wishing for himself.”
― Florence Scovel Shinn, The Game of Life and How to Play It

“if you run away your problems will run after you. Be undisturbed by a situation, and it will fall away of its own weight.”
― Florence Scovel Shinn, The Wisdom of Florence Scovel Shinn

“You must form the habit of living in the fourth dimension, “The World of the Wondrous.” It is the world where you do not judge by appearances.”
― Florence Scovel Shinn, The Secret Door to Success

“The only person to change, is yourself. As you change, all the conditions around you will change! People will change! When you are undisturbed by a situation it falls away of its own weight.”
― Florence Scovel Shinn, The Power of the Spoken Word