Phil Santos > Phil's Quotes

“Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.”
― Mary Oliver

“It's no wonder we don't defend the land where we live. We don't live here. We live in television programs and movies and books and with celebrities and in heaven and by rules and laws and abstractions created by people far away and we live anywhere and everywhere except in our particular bodies on this particular land at this particular moment in these particular circumstances.”
― Derrick Jensen, Endgame, Vol. 2: Resistance

“Writing is really very easy. Tap a vein and bleed onto the page. Everything else is just technical.”
― Derrick Jensen

“Premise Eight: The needs of the natural world are more important than the needs of the economic system.”
― Derrick Jensen, Endgame, Vol. 1: The Problem of Civilization

“Power, time, gravity, love. The forces that really kick ass are all invisible.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“Our partner's sexuality does not belong to us. It isn't just for and about us, and we should not assume that it rightfully falls within our jurisdiction.”
― Esther Perel, Mating in Captivity: Reconciling the Erotic and the Domestic

“Love enjoys knowing everything about you; desire needs mystery. Love likes to shrink the distance that exists between me and you, while desire is energized by it. If intimacy grows through repetition and familiarity, eroticism is numbed by repetition. It thrives on the mysterious, the novel, and the unexpected. Love is about having; desire is about wanting. An expression of longing, desire requires ongoing elusiveness. It is less concerned with where it has already been than passionate about where it can still go. But too often, as couples settle into the comforts of love, they cease to fan the flame of desire. They forget that fire needs air.”
― Esther Perel, Mating in Captivity: Reconciling the Erotic and the Domestic

“It’s hard to feel attracted to someone who has abandoned her sense of autonomy.”
― Esther Perel, Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence

“Everyone should cultivate a secret garden.”
― Esther Perel, Mating in Captivity: Reconciling the Erotic and the Domestic

“Trouble looms when monogamy is no longer a free expression of loyalty but a form of enforced compliance.”
― Esther Perel

“The grand illusion of committed love is that we think our partners are ours. In truth, their separateness is unassailable, and their mystery is forever ungraspable. As soon as we can begin to acknowledge this, sustained desire becomes a real possibility. It’s remarkable to me how a sudden threat to the status quo (an affair, an infatuation, a prolonged absence, or even a really good fight) can suddenly ignite desire. There’s nothing like the fear of loss to make those old shoes look new again.”
― Esther Perel, Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence

“Beginnings are always ripe with possibilities, for they hold the promise of completion. Through love we imagine a new way of being. You see me as I’ve never seen myself. You airbrush my imperfections, and I like what you see. With you, and through you, I will become that which I long to be. I will become whole. Being chosen by the one you chose is one of the glories of falling in love. It generates a feeling of intense personal importance. I matter. You confirm my significance.”
― Esther Perel, Mating in Captivity: Reconciling the Erotic and the Domestic

“It's hard to experience desire when you're weighted down by concern.”
― Esther Perel, Mating in Captivity: Reconciling the Erotic and the Domestic

“because the erotic frisson is such that the kiss that you only imagine giving,can be as powerful and as enchanting as hours of actual lovemaking. As Marcel Proust said, it's our imagination that is responsible for love, not the other person.”
― Esther Perel

“The urge to transform one's appearance, to dance outdoors, to mock the powerful and embrace perfect strangers is not easy to suppress.”
― Barbara Ehrenreich, Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy

“Austerity means to eliminate the comforts and cushions in your life that you have learned to snuggle into and lose wakefulness. Take away anything that dulls your edge. No newspapers or magazines. No TV. No candy, cookies, or sweets. No sex. No cuddling. No reading of anything at all while you eat or sit on the toilet. Reduce working time to a necessary minimum. No movies. No conversation that isn't about truth, love, or the divine.

If you take on these disciplines for a few weeks, as well as any other disciplines that may particularly cut through your unique habits of dullness, then your life will be stripped of routine distraction. All that will be left is the edge you have been avoiding by means of your daily routine. You will have to face the basic discomfort and dissatisfaction that is the hidden texture of your life. You will be alive with the challenge of living your truth, rather than hiding form it.

Unadorned suffering is the bedmate of masculine growth. Only by staying intimate with your personal suffering can you feel through it to its source. By putting all your attention into work, TV, sex, and reading, your suffering remains unpenetrated, and the source remains hidden. Your life becomes structured entirely by your favorite means of sidestepping the suffering you rarely allow yourself to feel. And when you do touch the surface of your suffering, perhaps in the form of boredom, you quickly pick up a magazine or the remote control.

Instead, feel your suffering, rest with it, embrace it, make love with it. Feel your suffering so deeply and thoroughly that you penetrate it, and realize its fearful foundation. Almost everything you do, you do because you are afraid to die. And yet dying is exactly what you are doing, from the moment you are born. Two hours of absorption in a good Super Bowl telecast may distract you temporarily, but the fact remains. You were born as a sacrifice. And you can either participate in the sacrifice, dissolving in the giving of your gift, or you can resist it, which is your suffering.

By eliminating the safety net of comforts in your life, you have the opportunity to free fall in this moment between birth and death, right through the hole of your fear, into the unthreatenable openness which is the source of your gifts. The superior man lives as this spontaneous sacrifice of love.”
― David Deida, The Way of the Superior Man: A Spiritual Guide to Mastering the Challenges of Women, Work, and Sexual Desire

“As long as life continues, the creative challenge is to tussle, play, and make love with the present moment while giving your unique gift.”
― David Deida, The Way of the Superior Man: A Spiritual Guide to Mastering the Challenges of Women, Work, and Sexual Desire

“It is honorable for a man to admit his fears, resistance, and edge of practice. It is simply true that each man has his limit, his capacity for growth, and his destiny. But it is dishonorable for him to lie to himself or others about his real place. He shouldn’t pretend he is more enlightened than he is—nor should he stop short of his actual edge. The more a man is playing his real edge, the more valuable he is as good company for other men, the more he can be trusted to be authentic and fully present. Where a man’s edge is located is less important than whether he is actually living his edge in truth, rather than being lazy or deluded.”
― David Deida, The Way of the Superior Man: A Spiritual Guide to Mastering the Challenges of Women, Work, and Sexual Desire

“Many Indians have told me that the most basic difference between Western and indigenous ways of being is that Westerners view the world as dead, and not as filled with speaking, thinking, feeling subjects as worthy and valuable as themselves.”
― Derrick Jensen (The Culture of Make Believe)

“Love does not imply pacifism.”
― Derrick Jensen, Endgame, Vol. 1: The Problem of Civilization

“Learning has to come from doing, not intellectualizing.”
― Derrick Jensen, The Culture of Make Believe

“Sometimes people don't want to hear the truth because they don't want their illusions destroyed.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“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

“You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“There are no facts, only interpretations.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once.”
― Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

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

“When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas we conquered long ago.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings -- always darker, emptier and simpler.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche