Rachel Naomi Remen Quotes - Page 5

A loving silence often has more power to heal and to connect than the most well-intentioned words.

Everybody is a story.

Big messages come in small packages. All it may take to restore someone's trust in life may be returning a lost earring or a dropped glove.

Befriending life is less a matter of knowledge than a question of wisdom. It is not about mastering life, controlling it or exerting our will over it, no matter how well intentioned our will may be. Befriending life is more about harmlessness than it is about control.

Is it possible to live so defensively that you never get to live at all?

Life wastes nothing. Over and over again every molecule that has ever been is gathered up by the hand of life to be reshaped into yet another form. p 259

Silence is a place of great power and healing.

Religion is a bridge to the spiritual, but the spiritual lies beyond religion.

I don't think there's such a thing as a bad emotion. The only bad emotion is a stuck emotion.

The wisdom in the story of the most educated and powerful person is often not greater than the wisdom in the story of a child, and the life of a child can teach us as much as the life of a sage.

Just Listen an excerpt

When people are blessed they discover that their lives matter, that there is something in them worthy of blessing.

There should be a word that means beginning/end because nothing begins without something dying.

I think that people get experiences, and out of those experiences come meaning and ideas. It's like watching a rose bush grow.

I spent the first forty years of my life making major interventions into other people's lives, and I have an idea of the limitations of that method. I see a major event as rather like major surgery. It is a moment, but whether people use it, whether people go with it, needs to be seen.

Those who bless and serve life find a place of belonging and strength, a refuge.

All natural processes are long processes and they last.

My sense is that you can never teach anybody anything, or change anybody in ways that they don't already have in mind.

Belief traps or frees us.

This simple thing has not been that easy to learn. it certainly went against everything I had been taught since I was very young. I thought people listened only because they were too timid to speak or did not know the answer. A loving silence often has far more power to heal and to connect than the most well intentioned words.

Illiness could be considered a Western form of meditation.

A shaman is someone who has a wound that will not heal. He sits by the side of the road with his open wound exposed.

Cancer changes your whole life.

People are waking up in their homes - without conferences. They're waking up because life is waking them up, not because of some conference called "Body and Soul."