Inner Life Quotes - Page 7

• That's one of the beauties, I think, of African American life. There was this thing called slavery and adjustments were made. It literally destroyed millions, but it didn't destroy everybody and it didn't destroy the inner lives of all the people who experienced it.

  John Edgar Wideman

  Thinking, People, African American

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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• Poetry is the inner life of a culture, its nervous system, its deepest way of imagining the world. A culture that ignores its poets, chokes off its nervous system and becomes mortally ill.

  Erica Jong

  Culture, World, Way

  Erica Jong (2006). “Fear of Fifty”, p.97, Penguin

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• We often hear the teachers of all creeds lamenting the difficulty of keeping up in the minds of believers a lively apprehension of the truth which they nominally recognize, so that it may penetrate the feelings, and acquire a real mastery over the conduct.... When it has come to be a hereditary creed, and to be received passively, not actively ... there is a progressive tendency to forget all of the belief except the formularies ... until it almost ceases to connect itself at all with the inner life of the human being.

  John Stuart Mill

  Teacher, Real, Feelings

  Source: www.usconstitution.net

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• We all have two lives: an inner life and an outer life. Your inner life is your soul life, which includes your mind, will and emotions. Your outer life is your physical life. And while God cares about every detail of your life, He is more concerned with your inner life than your outer life.

  Joyce Meyer

  Two, Soul, Mind

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• Without a revolution of the inner life, however slow, all our big designs are worthless. The work we have to do is with ourselves if we're ever going to be at peace with each other...the good that flows from it will shape our societies in an unprogrammed, unforeseen way, under the control of no single group of people or set of ideas.

  Ian Mcewan

  Ideas, People, Design

  "Black Dogs". Book by Ian McEwan, December 29, 1998.

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• For me, psychology and art interact and overlap in so many ways. Psychology is the study of the inner life and creativity comes from the imagination and a response to the environment, as you know. So they're both very similar in that way because it's about one's inner life interacting with the environment and what comes from that.

  Kelly Carlin-McCall

  Art, Creativity, Imagination

  Source: www.psychologyart.com

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• Do you realize you can actually listen a person's soul into existence? Your fervent interest in the inner life of those you care for can awaken their dormant powers. The teacher Richard Moss says 'The greatest gift you can give another is the purity of your attention.' Offer this gift.

  Rob Brezsny

  Life, Teacher, Giving

  Rob Brezsny (2005). “Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings”, p.178, Frog Books

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• When you release the wrongdoer from the wrong, you cut a malignant tumor out of your inner life. You set a prisoner free, but you discover that the real prisoner was yourself.

  Lewis B. Smedes

  Life, Freedom, Real

  "Forgiveness: You Can’t Have It Both Ways" by Maria Mayo, www.huffingtonpost.com. May 22, 2012.

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• To persevere is always a reflection of the state of one's inner life, one's philosophy and one's perspective

  David Guterson

  Philosophy, Reflection, Perspective

  David Guterson (2009). “Snow Falling on Cedars”, p.105, A&C Black

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• The history of the creative progress of individual artists shows that, along with their spiritual growth and the increasing complexity of their inner life, their forms of expression become more complex.

  Mieczyslaw Jastrun

  Spiritual, Artist, Expression

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• I used to think it was possible for an artist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory.

  Don DeLillo

  Taken, Artist, Thinking

  "Don DeLillo: 'I'm not trying to manipulate reality - this is what I see and hear" by Robert McCrum, www.theguardian.com. August 7, 2010.

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• Men who have a tempestuous inner life and do not seek to give vent to it by talking or writing are simply men who have no tempestuous inner life. Give company to a lonely man and he will talk more than anyone.

  Cesare Pavese

  Lonely, Writing, Men

  Cesare Pavese, Alma Elizabeth Murch (1961). “This Business of Living”, p.101, Transaction Publishers

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• As we unfold spiritually, the reality of our inner life enters new dimensions and we must change with it.

  Harold Klemp

  Reality, Dimensions

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• There were really funny characteristics about this guy [Richard Nixon], chief of which would be that he seemed to devote about 85 percent of his waking energy to suppressing any sign of his emotional response to anything that was going on around him, and the other 15 percent blurting out those authentic responses in the silliest and most inopportune ways. And he had these smiles that would come at the most inappropriate times - just flashes that there was an inner life screaming to get out.

  Harry Shearer

  Emotional, Guy, Would Be

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• Choice of attention - to pay attention to this and ignore that - is to the inner life what choice of action is to the outer. In both cases, a man is responsible for his choice and must accept the consequences, whatever they may be.

  W. H. Auden

  Men, Choices, Attention

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• There is not a place to which the Christian can withdraw from the world, whether it be outwardly or in the sphere of the inner life. Any attempt to escape from the world must sooner or later be paid for with a sinful surrender to the world.

  Dietrich Bonhoeffer

  Christian, Spheres, World

  Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1965). “Ethics”

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• There are certain people that you don't have to even work at extracting their inner life. It is just there and they're happy to share it with you.

  Carol Friedman

  People, Share, Certain

  Interview with Austin Allen, bigthink.com. April 21, 2010.

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• For me there's several components to picture-taking and it starts with my goals as an artist. It's capturing I guess the inner life of my subject and then it is giving them their idealized version of themselves.

  Carol Friedman

  Artist, Picture Taking, Giving

  Interview with Austin Allen, bigthink.com. April 21, 2010.

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• Standing on soil feels so much different than standing on city pavement; it lets you look inward and reflect and see who you really are, while you see a beautiful, unspoiled land as far as the eye can see. It allows your inner life to grow

  Ricardo Montalban

  Beautiful, Eye, Land

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• Fiction is risky for writers also in that the process of making certain books, of shaping certain narratives, leaves scars and marks on your inner life.

  Chris Abani

  Book, Fiction, Narrative

  Interview with Peter Orner, therumpus.net. February 10, 2014.

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• Flow is the process of achieving happiness through control over one's inner life. The optimal state of inner experience is order in consciousness. This happens when we focus our attention (psychic energy) on realistic goals and when our skills match the challenges we face.

  Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

  Order, Psychics, Skills

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• The profound political changes we need in order to heal our planet will not come about through fragmented problem solving or intellectual analyses that overlook the deepest yearnings and intuitions of the heart....As we begin to cultivate a rich inner life and experience our connection with all life, we realize how little of what society tells us we need is actually important for our well-being....Green politics must address the spiritual vacuum of industrial society.

  Petra Kelly

  Spiritual, Heart, Order

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• When you come to the spiritual needs, the emotional needs, the needs of our inner life, then politics and business and technology are completely impotent. They are completely unable to meet and address the needs of human beings.

  Satish Kumar

  Spiritual, Technology, Emotional

  "An Interview with Satish Kumar at the New Story Summit". Kosmos Interview, www.kosmosjournal.org. November 18, 2014.

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• If we grow wiser and more learned in our intercourse with wise and learned persons, how much more will we gain in our inner life by communing with God in prayer.

  Huldrych Zwingli

  Wise, Prayer, Learned Person

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• Solitude is so necessary both for society and for the individual that when society fails to provide sufficient solitude to develop the inner life of the persons who compose it, they rebel and seek false solitudes.

  Thomas Merton

  Solitude, Rebel, Failing

  Thomas Merton (2002). “No Man Is an Island”, p.271, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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