Top 35 Darrell Calkins Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Well-being, or wholeness, implies integrity and harmony between all existing elements, providing freedom for the whole.”

— Darrell Calkins

2. “Forgiveness is really about absolution: to set free. But if you look carefully at the dynamic, the one you’re setting free is yourself.”

— Darrell Calkins

3. “There’s surprising relief and regeneration in finding ourselves within a moment of genuine grace, however small or temporary it may be.”

— Darrell Calkins

4. “Ironically, to “inspire” means to breathe, to infuse life by breathing. As with a lot of things that have the capacity to inspire, it takes some time to get past the apparent boredom and find the hidden secrets. I figure if I keep harping on it, maybe someone will eventually explore the possibility long enough to realize just how breathtaking it is.”

— Darrell Calkins

5. “Conscience exists as a reality-check for intent, but it’s not intent itself. Anyone who really plays, explores and celebrates life has the right intent.”

— Darrell Calkins

6. “In my experience, most people are actually seeking recovery from the monotony and anxiety of qualitative repetition. This applies to body, emotions and mind. And that monotony and anxiety involves inertia just as much as over-use, meaning inertia in some areas and over-use in others.”

— Darrell Calkins

7. “As a soul, you have the freedom – and earned responsibility – to transpose your personal process of evolution, to manifest your greatest talents and vision, into the work that matters to you most as a means to personal redemption.”

— Darrell Calkins

8. “People generally believe that stress is responsible for depletion, but apathy and uninspired systematic repetition are equally responsible. Or rather, systematic repetition produces as much or more stress and anxiety as anything else.”

— Darrell Calkins

9. “Transcendence is a word I don’t use often; I prefer transformation. Why? Because the essential game is about using what is in front of you and in you exactly as it is, but finding a way to do something with that that is surprising and an expression of inspiration and intuition. You engage reality and make something out of it that only you can, alchemizing limitation, conflict or what appears to be bad into something else.”

— Darrell Calkins

10. “It takes a relative amount of courage just to get out of bed each day. There are those who are stronger in their courage, and they help to compel us along a little further in the fulfillment of our faith.”

— Darrell Calkins

11. “Truth, or mystery basically, seeks the expression of itself. That is, evolution exists to create more mystery, not to answer or end the existing mysteries. This is why with every “truth” revealed, or every answer given, all that actually occurs is the creation of yet a more complex and mysterious question.”

— Darrell Calkins

12. “Transcendence is more about the personal act of not engaging the enemy, finding a way out of the cage that is being designed for you at a particular moment by others, circumstance, or your own bad habits and ignorance.”

— Darrell Calkins

13. “If you know what life really wants, and if you know what you really want, you can begin to create the relationship.”

— Darrell Calkins

14. “Laughter has got to be the single healthiest activity one can perform. Just think how healthy you would be if you could sincerely laugh at that which now oppresses you.”

— Darrell Calkins

15. “No one will improve his health significantly without accurately perceiving priorities, knowing clearly what is at stake if those are not attended to and what is to be gained if acted on correctly. That’s the basic homework before any change can come about. Then that knowledge has to be transformed into a sustainable motivation.”

— Darrell Calkins

16. “The greatest tragedy in life is our inability to experience and express fascination for the people and events we love while in their presence.”

— Darrell Calkins

17. “Recovery through sleep isn’t going to happen if the majority of the components of your being aren’t getting enough stimulation or resistance to work against. Your brain may be tired after work, but if your body and emotions haven’t been challenged through the day, they’re going to keep irritating you even if you’re asleep. They don’t need rest; they need work for real recovery to take place.”

— Darrell Calkins

18. “Life will give you what you need once you will do something with it. It may not give you what you want so as to be as comfortable as you want, as Nature’s concern is need as it relates to evolution. In my humble opinion, Nature is too kind, but, as I say, the game is big, and the challenges and temptations absolute. And this is a fascinating aspect of the totality of beauty; it gives more than is only necessary. The generosity is mind- and heart boggling.”

— Darrell Calkins

19. “Physical well-being necessitates listening to what you already know, and then taking it seriously enough to act accordingly. When you wake up and feel the impulse to arch your back, stretch and exhale with a loud sigh, for God’s sake, do it.”

— Darrell Calkins

20. “By its nature, what you yearn for is most often intimidating. It produces, and itself is, a question, and one that is not easy to engage or answer.”

— Darrell Calkins

21. “These five values are the organic origins of what could be called intuitive conscience. They are also what we experience personally as our core, essential yearnings, however distorted or confused we may interpret them: to care and be cared for; to share equally in freedom and responsibility; to belong, and to trust that what we belong to will continue; that there exists an objective hierarchy of virtue and wisdom; that there exists that which is unquestionably sacred or divine.”

— Darrell Calkins

22. “What is at the base of shame or guilt? It is the consciousness of an imbalance, or of an action in the past that has caused, and probably continues to cause, suffering.”

— Darrell Calkins

23. “It’s highly refined stuff – holding to one’s purpose and focus, but also intuiting the value of being a piece in a larger design and evolution. The balance between these two rhythms is where and when true harmony is achieved and magic happens. Often, just the release of the obsession for personal preferences and to personally gain opens the door.”

— Darrell Calkins

24. “Sometimes I wonder how much of our suffering we allow or impose on ourselves simply in search of our worthiness to accept our own respect and appreciation.”

— Darrell Calkins

25. “Everyone claims to want the truth. If you really want it, I’d suggest investing seriously in humor and this mysterious skill of transforming bad news into good. Otherwise, you’ll only get more frustrated.”

— Darrell Calkins

26. “One could make a nice link between imagination and spirit. To make that link, all we need is some inspiration. Essentially, imagination has the innate potential to compel or inspire and to set in motion causation. That’s why it exists.”

— Darrell Calkins

27. “The divine is a mystery, so the impulse to really discover, like a child, has to be the core response to anything.”

— Darrell Calkins

28. “The only resolution is to spontaneously invent an unknown, unique set of qualities and actions so as to blend perfectly with the actual requirements you’re confronted with.”

— Darrell Calkins

29. “Getting down to the gym a couple days a week and having low-fat milk in your morning latte isn’t going to make much of a dent in a system or lifestyle that is essentially, well, unwell.”

— Darrell Calkins

30. “Knowledge burnished through suffering becomes wisdom, which eventually opens into the calling to return in innocence to simple harmony.”

— Darrell Calkins

31. “Appreciation, affection, focus and intention fill up the space of self-reflection, and one loses oneself in the engagement. And what a relief it is when you get there.”

— Darrell Calkins

32. “How many people are watching a movie right now, or reading a book or listening to a song or looking into their life or dreaming with this profound, conscious or not, yearning more than anything for some kind of relationship somewhere with someone or something that would cause them to stagger in intimate rawness in friendship and love?”

— Darrell Calkins

33. “The infinite possibilities that exist in any given moment cause infinite possibilities in response. The wording is correct here; the possibilities exist already, and have already caused the existing possibilities of response.”

— Darrell Calkins

34. “Mastery of anything is, more than anything else, the transformation of work into play. Giving orders and answers, never making mistakes, and having around you others with the opinion that you are great has nothing at all to do with it. Read carefully: to yearn for, to be compelled by, is being called to play.”

— Darrell Calkins

35. “What you have to do to achieve what you want necessitates the creative actualization of the totality of your being as it is. Nothing more, but also nothing less.”

— Darrell Calkins

36. “Yearning often does not provide a sense of attainment or “peace,” as it is fuel for one’s personal purpose, to in some specific way give or create; to do that is not necessarily easy or peaceful.”

— Darrell Calkins