Inner Life Quotes - Page 9

• The experience of helping a fellow man in danger, or even of training in a realistic manner to be ready to give this help, tends to change the balance of power in a youth's inner life with the result that compassion can become the master motive.

  Kurt Hahn

  Men, Compassion, Giving

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• I've never done anything but dream. This, and this alone, has been the meaning of my life. My only real concern has been my inner life.

  Fernando Pessoa

  Dream, Real, Done

  Fernando Pessoa, Richard Zenith (1996). “Book of Disquietude”, Carcanet Press Limited

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• The academic bias against subjectivity not only forces our students to write poorly ("It is believed...," instead of, "I believe..."), it deforms their thinking about themselves and their world. In a single stroke, we delude our students into believing that bad prose turns opinions into facts and we alienate them from their own inner lives.

  Parker J. Palmer

  Believe, Writing, Heart

  Parker J. Palmer (2017). “The Courage to Teach Guide for Reflection and Renewal”, p.113, John Wiley & Sons

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• I am neither virgin nor priest enough to play with the inner life.

  Jean-Paul Sartre

  Play, Enough, Priests

  Jean-Paul Sartre (2013). “Nausea”, p.22, New Directions Publishing

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• Knot the tie and go to work, unknot the tie and go to sleep. I sleep. I dream. I wake. I sing. I get out the hammer and start knocking in the wooden pegs that affix the meaning to the landscape, the inner life to the body, the names to the things. I float too much to wander, like you, in the real world. I envy it but that’s the dealio—you’re a train and I’m a trainstation and when I try to guess your trajectory I end up telling my own story.

  Richard Siken

  Dream, Real, Sleep

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• Only through the medium of the public physical world can the mind of one person make a difference to the mind of another. The mind is in its own place and in each of us lies an inner life, the life of a ghostly Robinson Crusoe. People can see, hear, and jolt one another's bodies, but they are irremediably blind and deaf to the workings of one another's minds

  Gilbert Ryle

  Lying, Differences, People

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• I wanted to live the inner life of every man I saw, look at the world through his eyes.

  Aleksandr Kuprin

  Eye, Men, Looks

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• The brain immediately confronts us with its great complexity. The human brain weighs only three to four pounds but contains about 100 billion neurons. Although that extraordinary number is of the same order of magnitude as the number of stars in the Milky Way, it cannot account for the complexity of the brain. The liver probably contains 100 million cells, but 1,000 livers do not add up to a rich inner life.

  Gerald Fischbach

  Stars, Cells, Order

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• If you make a habit of sincere prayer, your life will be very noticeably and profoundly altered. Prayer stamps with its indelible mark our actions and demeanor. A tranquillity of bearing, a facial and bodily repose, are observed in those whose inner lives are thus enriched. Within the depths of consciousness a flame kindles. And man sees himself. He discovers his selfishness, his silly pride, his fears, his greeds, his blunders. He develops a sense of moral obligation, intellectual humility. Thus begins a journey of the soul toward the realm of grace.

  Alexis Carrel

  Prayer, Selfish, Silly

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• The advance of scientific knowledge does not seem to make either our universe or our inner life in it any less mysterious.

  John B. S. Haldane

  Knowledge, Science, Doe

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• Teaching, like any truly human activity, emerges from one's inwardness, for better or worse. As I teach I project the condition of my soul onto my students, my subject, and our way of being together. The entanglements I experience in the classroom are often no more or less than the convolutions of my inner life. Viewed from this angle, teaching holds a mirror to the soul. If I am willing to look in that mirror and not run from what I see, I have a chance to gain self-knowledge-and knowing myself is as crucial to good teaching as knowing my students and my subject.

  Parker J. Palmer

  Running, Educational, Teaching

  Parker J. Palmer, Megan Scribner (2007). “The Courage to Teach Guide for Reflection and Renewal”, p.102, John Wiley & Sons

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• The strongest wish of a vast number of earnest men and women to-day is for a basis of religious belief which shall rest, not upon tradition or external authority or historical evidence, but upon the ascertainable facts of human experience. The craving for immediacy, which we have seen to be characteristic of all mysticism, now takes the form of a desire to establish the validity of the God-consciousness as a normal part of the healthy inner life.

  William Ralph Inge

  Religious, Men, Numbers

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• I love a natural look in pictures. I like people with a feeling one way or another - it shows an inner life. I like to see that there’s something going on inside them.

  Marilyn Monroe

  Inspiring, People, Feelings

  "Biography / Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• We cannot segregate the human heart from the environment outside us and say that once one of these is reformed everything will be improved. Man is organic with the world. His inner life moulds the environment and is itself also deeply affected by it. The one acts upon the other and every abiding change in the life of man is the result of these mutual reactions.

  Shoghi Effendi

  Heart, Men, Abiding

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• Compassion may be called the fundamental of all good art because it alone can tell you what other beings feel and experience. Only compassion severs the bonds of your personal limitations, and gives you deep access into the inner life of the character you study, without which you cannot properly prepare it for the stage

  Michael Chekhov

  Art, Character, Compassion

  Michael Chekhov, Mala Powers (2013). “To the Actor: On the Technique of Acting”, p.90, Routledge

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• Most true happiness comes from one's inner life, from the disposition of the mind and soul. Admittedly, a good inner life is difficult to achieve, especially in these trying times. It takes reflection and contemplation and self-discipline.

  William L. Shirer

  Happiness, Reflection, Self

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• The Spirit has his own existence and personal function in the inner life of God and the economy of salvation: his task is to bring about the unity of the human race in the Body of Christ, but he also imparts to this unity a personal, and hence diversified, character.

  John Meyendorff

  Character, Race, Unity

  John Meyendorff (1981). “The Orthodox Church: Its Past and Its Role in the World Today”, p.178, St Vladimir's Seminary Press

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• As an experienced artist, I carry my work like a secret pregnancy. I am always aware of inner life and the need to protect it.

  Julia Cameron

  Art, Pregnancy, Secret

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• Meditation simplifies our outer life and energizes our inner life. Meditation gives us a natural and spontaneous life, a life that becomes so natural and spontaneous that we cannot breathe without being conscious of our own divinity.

  Sri Chinmoy

  Giving, Meditation, Divinity

  Sri Chinmoy (1997). “The Wings of Joy: Finding Your Path to Inner Peace”, p.28, Simon and Schuster

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• Viscosity and velocity are opposites, yet they can look the same. Viscosity causes the stillness of disinclination, velocity causes the stillness of fascination. An observer can't tell if a person is silent and still because inner life has stalled or because inner life is transfixingly busy.

  Susanna Kaysen

  Opposites, Causes, Fascination

  Susanna Kaysen (2013). “Girl, Interrupted”, p.77, Vintage

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• If we would accept heaven's life, we need by all means to live in the world and to participate in its duties and affairs. In this way, we accept a spiritual life by means of our moral and civic life; and there is no other way a spiritual life can be formed within us, no other way our spirits can be prepared for heaven. This is because living an inner life and not an outer life at the same time is like living in a house that has no foundation, that gradually either settles or develops gaping cracks or totters until it collapses.

  Emanuel Swedenborg

  Spiritual, Mean, Heaven

  Emanuel Swedenborg (2000). “Heaven and Hell”, Chrysalis Books

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• All my novels are very much directly related to my inner life, even though I'm inventing characters, even though it's fiction, even though it's make-believe, it nevertheless is coming out of the deepest recesses of myself.

  Paul Auster

  Believe, Character, Fiction

  Interview with Austin Allen, bigthink.com. November 5, 2009.

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• When a book's pattern and the shape of its inner life is as plain to the reader as it is to the author -- then perhaps it is time to throw the book aside, as having had its day, and start again on something new.

  Doris Lessing

  Book, Shapes, Patterns

  Doris Lessing (2012). “The Golden Notebook”, p.21, HarperCollins UK

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• Poetry is one of the ancient arts, and it began, as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth. Also, it began through the process of seeing, and feeling, and hearing, and smelling, and touching, and then remembering--I mean remembering in words--what these perceptual experiences were like, while trying to describe the endless invisible fears and desires of our inner lives.

  Mary Oliver

  Art, Mean, Poetry

  Mary Oliver (1994). “A Poetry Handbook”, p.106, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Poetry seems especially like nothing else so much as itself. Poetry is not like, it is the very lining of the inner life.

  C.D. Wright

  Poetry Is, Seems

  C.D. Wright (2012). “Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil”, p.59, Copper Canyon Press

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