Top 90 David Deida Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 2 of 2

51. “If knowing the truth is sufficient for you, then practice the art of philosophy. If only living the truth will suffice, then practice the art of love through your mind, your emotions, and your body.”

— David Deida

52. “Only when the front of your body is relaxed and opened, your breath full and deep, and your gaze unguarded and directly connected with another person’s eyes, can your fullest intelligence manifest spontaneously in the situation.”

— David Deida

53. “Even when your relationship is painful, even when you feel hurt, you can practice opening your heart. You can practice love. This is the foundation of Intimate Communion: to practice opening your heart in every moment, including when you feel hurt. Rather than turn away or close down, you can practice loving.”

— David Deida

54. “Everything in your life, from your diet to your career, must be aligned with your purpose if you are to act with coherence and integrity in the world. If you know your purpose, your deepest desire, then the secret of success is to discipline your life so that you support your deepest purpose and minimize distractions and detours.”

— David Deida

55. “The most loving women are the women who will test you the most. She wants you to be your fullest, most magnificent self. She won’t settle for anything less. She knows it is true of you. She knows in your deepest heart you are free, you are Shiva. Anything less than that she will torment. And, as you know, she’s quite good at it.”

— David Deida

56. “By leaning just beyond your fear, you challenge your limits compassionately, without trying to escape the feeling of fear itself. You step beyond the solid ground of security with an open heart. You stand in the space of unknowingness, raw and awake. Here, the gravity of deep being will attend you to the only place where fear is obsolete: the eternal free fall of home. Where you always are. Own your fear, and lean just beyond it. In every aspect of your life. Starting now.”

— David Deida

57. “A fearful man who knows he is fearful is far more trustable than a fearful man who isn’t aware of his fear.”

— David Deida

58. “You must listen to your woman more as an oracle than as an advisor.”

— David Deida

59. “The real practice of love goes beyond satisfaction and dissatisfaction. Wallowing in pleasure can be just as limiting as wallowing in pain if you don’t open your heart beyond the satisfaction of your personal emotional needs.”

— David Deida

60. “You should always listen to your woman, and then make your own decision. If you choose to go with your woman’s suggestion even when deep in your heart you feel that another decision is more wise, you are, in effect, saying, “I don’t trust my own wisdom.” You are weakening yourself by telling yourself this. You are weakening your woman’s trust in you: why should she trust your wisdom if you don’t?”

— David Deida

61. “Infinite Love is who we really are and who we refuse to be. This refusal is our most essential tension.”

— David Deida

62. “How do you react with your body, breath, and eyes? Notice if you react to a person or situation that hurts you by withdrawing, hiding, or closing in on yourself. Notice if there are times when you find it difficult to look into someone’s eyes, or times your chest and solar plexus become tense and contracted. These are signs of an unskillful reaction to hurt.”

— David Deida

63. “A life lived well embraces death by feeling open, from heart to all, in every moment. Wide open, you can offer without holding back, you can receive without pushing away.”

— David Deida

64. “The way you relate to your woman’s chaos reflects the way you react to the chaos of the world. If you are the kind of man who needs everything placed neatly in its nice little box, then you will also try to box your woman’s emotions. If you are the kind of man who would rather hire other people to take care of the chaos in your attic, or the chaos of your finances, you would probably also rather leave it to someone else to take care of the chaos of your woman.”

— David Deida

65. “Almost everything you do, you do because you are afraid to die. And yet dying is exactly what you are doing, from the moment you are born. Two hours of absorption in a good Super Bowl telecast may distract you temporarily, but the fact remains. You were born as a sacrifice. And you can either participate in the sacrifice, dissolving in the giving of your gift, or you can resist it, which is your suffering.”

— David Deida

66. “A free man is free to acknowledge his fears, without hiding them, or hiding from them. Live with your lips pressed against your fears, kissing your fears, neither pulling back nor aggressively violating them.”

— David Deida

67. “Intimacy is about growing more than you could by yourself, through the art of mutual gifting.”

— David Deida

68. “Limited money and family obligations have never stopped a man who really wanted to do something, although they provide excuses for a man who is not really up to the creative challenge in the first place. Find out today whether you are willing to do what it takes.”

— David Deida

69. “But if she is a good woman, a strong woman, she won’t tolerate your childish needs for a pat on the head, collecting bigger toys, and being king of the mountain. A good woman will love the childlike part of you, but she wants your life to be guided by your deepest truths, not your untended childhood wounds. She wants to feel that at your core you have grown beyond the need for kudos and million-dollar toys. She wants to feel your self-generated strength of truth.”

— David Deida

70. “If I can work enough, then one day I could rest.” Or, “One day my woman will understand something and then she will stop complaining.” Or, “I’m only doing this now so that one day I can do what I really want with my life.” The masculine error is to think that eventually things will be different in some fundamental way. They won’t. It never ends. As long as life continues, the creative challenge is to tussle, play, and make love with the present moment while giving your unique gift.”

— David Deida

71. “You are that which you seek, but you have left your own deepness and are looking elsewhere. The stress of not finding it creates its own need to be released. And so the cycle continues. You are chasing your own tail, and much of the time that tail looks suspiciously like a woman.”

— David Deida

72. “If necessary, a man should live with a hurting heart rather than a closed one.”

— David Deida

73. “Violence is always an effort toward greater freedom or love. Openness is freedom and love. Even the most violent or self-destructive emotions are rooted in the heart’s need for openness, to be free, to give and receive love.”

— David Deida

74. “Your lust reveals your real desire to unite with the feminine, to penetrate as deeply as possible, to receive her delicious light as radiant food for your masculine soul, and to give her your entirety, losing yourself in the giving, so that you are both liberated beyond your selves in the explosion of your gifts.”

— David Deida

75. “If you want real passion, you need a ravisher and a ravishee; otherwise, you just have two buddies who decide to rub genitals in bed.”

— David Deida

76. “One of the deepest feminine desires in intimacy is precisely not to have to always figure it out for her man and guide him.”

— David Deida

77. “Your essential emotional tone – at ease in your deepest purpose or fearful in the ambiguity of your intent – becomes part of your children’s home.”

— David Deida

78. “Unadorned suffering is the bedmate of masculine growth. Only by staying intimate with your personal suffering can you feel through it to its source.”

— David Deida

79. “Learn to find humor in the unending emotional drama the feminine seems to enjoy so much.”

— David Deida

80. “I am going to speak some reckless words, and I want you to listen recklessly.”

— David Deida

81. “The most loving women are the women who will test you the most.”

— David Deida

82. “She already knows she can take care of herself just fine. Now, she takes care as love’s all. She loves love, and she loves opening as love’s bright and powerful grace. Breath by breath, she gives her body to be possessed by love, moved by love, lived by love, fiercely alive and without shame – in every moment taking all into heart, deeply, and opening as love’s all, shining as love’s every color, dancing as love’s every texture, whether or not she is with her lover.”

— David Deida

83. “One moment of total awareness is one moment of perfect enlightenment.”

— David Deida

84. “Without love, our lives are empty.”

— David Deida

85. “Knowing or feeling the deep openness who you are is fairly easy; living as this openness, and serving all others to live as this love, in every moment through all appearances, is where the art is.”

— David Deida

86. “When you walk, how can you let go of your old habits of tension and move as an expression of the love you feel you are at depth? At your job, how can you work as the love you truly are? What changes do you need to make in your daily life-rituals so that love can radiate through your every breath, action, and relationship?”

— David Deida

87. “If you are willing to feel exactly what is and open as you are, then your life unfolds as truth.”

— David Deida

88. “How can you be more responsible? Not necessarily by doing more work. You become more responsible by knowing your deepest purpose, and then arranging your finances and spiritual life from that knowingness.”

— David Deida

89. “What you settle for is determined by your fear.”

— David Deida

90. “Praise works. Information doesn’t. Praise motivates. Challenge doesn’t. Try it. Praise specific things you love about your woman five to ten times a day. Find out what happens.”

— David Deida