Stephen Mitchell Quotes

What we are tempted to call a disaster is sometimes the first, painful stage of a blessing.

True mastery can be gained by letting things go their own way.

The physical body is acknowledged as dust, the personal drama as delusion. It is as if the world we perceive through our senses, the whole gorgeous and terrible pageant, were the breath-thin surface of a bubble, and everything else, inside and outside, is pure radiance. Both suffering and joy come then like a brief reflection, and death like a pin.

When speech comes from a quiet heart, it has the strength of the orchid, and the fragrance of rock.

Education is no longer thought of as a preparation for adult life, but as a continuing process of growth and development from birth until death.

[Jesus] teaches that just as the sun gives light to both wicked and good, and the rain brings nourishment to righteous and unrighteous, God's compassion embraces all people. There are no pre-conditions for it, nothing we need to do first, nothing we have to believe. When we are ready to receive it, it is already there. And the more we live in its presence, the more effortlessly if flows through us, until we find that we no longer need external rules or Bibles or Messiahs.

When there's no way out, you just follow the way in front of you.

What is the gospel according to Jesus? Simply this: that the love we all long for in our innermost heart is already present, beyond longing.

Happily ever after doesn't begin with Once upon a time: it begins with Now.

If you listen to the traffic with a clear mind, without any concepts, it is not noisy, it is only what it is.

So actions themselves are not good and not bad; only the intention is important.

Creativity, not normality, has become the paradigm of mental health.

What people love about life is its miraculous beauty; what they hate about death is the loss and decay around it. Yet losing is not losing, and decay turns into beauty, as beauty turns back into decay. We are breathed in, breathed out. Therefore all you need is to understand the one breath that makes up the world.

Even the purest of teachers will face bitter criticism from those who feel threatened by him.

What may appear to be proud ungrateful and headstrong fron the outside may from the inside express an unshakable integrity of character. Pride, if it doesn't step over the line into arrogance, is simply an unprejudiced self-esteem. Ingratitude is the appropriate response to a kindness that has hooks on it. Headstrong is another word for trusting your own heart.

Whatever thought grips the mind at the time of death is the one which will propel it and decide for it the nature of its future birth. Thus if one wants to attain god after death, one has to think of him steadfastly... This is not as simple as it sounds, for at the time of death the mind automatically flies to the thought of an object (i.e. money, love) which has possessed it during its sojourn in the world. Thus one must think of god constantly.

Children understand that 'once upon a time' refers not only--not even primarily--to the past, but to the impalpable regions of the present, the deeper places inside us where princes and dragons, wizards and talking birds, impassable roads, impossible tasks, and happy endings have always existed, alive and bursting with psychic power.

But self-abasement is just inverted egoism. Anyone who acts with genuine humility will be as far from humiliation as from arrogance.

In a cookie factory, different cookies are baked in the shape of animals, cars, people, and airplanes. They all have different names and forms, but they are all made from the same dough, and they all taste the same.

There are two kinds of women: those who marry princes and those who marry frogs. The frogs never become princes, but it is an acknowledged fact that a prince may very well, in the course of an ordinary marrige, gradually, at first almost imperceptibly, turn into a frog. Happy the woman who after twenty-five years still wakes up beside the prince she fell in love with.

Love softens everything except our sense of integrity.

It is better to do your own duty badly than to perfectly do an others; when you do your duty, you are naturally free from sin.