Top 120 Elizabeth Lesser Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Don’t persuade, defend or interrupt. Be curious, be conversational, be real. And listen.”

— Elizabeth Lesser

2. “Look for a way to lift someone up. If that’s all you do, it’s enough.”

— Elizabeth Lesser

3. “How strange that the nature of life is change, yet the nature of human beings is to resist change. And how ironic that the difficult times we fear might ruin us are the very ones that can break us open and help us blossom into who we were meant to be.”

— Elizabeth Lesser

4. “May you listen to the voice within the beat even when you are tired. When you feel yourself breaking down, may you break open instead. May every experience in life be a door that opens your heart, expands your understanding and leads you to freedom.”

— Elizabeth Lesser

5. “If we want liberation, we must rewrite the Sleeping Beauty myth. No one is coming and no one else is to blame.”

— Elizabeth Lesser

6. “If we can stay awake when our lives are changing, secrets will be revealed to us-secrets about ourselves, about the nature of life, and about the eternal source of happiness and peace that is always available, always renewable, already within us.”

— Elizabeth Lesser

7. “Spirituality is a brave search for the truth about existence, fearlessly peering into the mysterious nature of life.”

— Elizabeth Lesser

8. “How strange that the nature of life is change, yet the nature of human beings is to resist change.”

— Elizabeth Lesser

9. “Grief is the proof of our love, a demonstration of how deeply we have allowed another to touch us.”

— Elizabeth Lesser

10. “When women hear each other’s stories, told from the heart, it gives us inspiration to keep on going.”

— Elizabeth Lesser

11. “One does not practice meditation to become a great meditator. We meditate to wake up and live, to become skilled at the art of living.”

— Elizabeth Lesser

12. “Grief is an expression that you loved well.”

— Elizabeth Lesser

13. “Life actually is this mystery and gift. And every moment of it can be full of real radical joy and wakefulness. And for some reason in our most difficult times, we have the best chance to wake up. Many people will tell you that their divorce or illness or loss of job was the wake up call.”

— Elizabeth Lesser

14. “Recognition of the harm that patriarchy has caused to people and the planet does not mean that men are wrong and women are right; rather it is a call for new organizational forms and for relishing gender differences within a context of equality.”

— Elizabeth Lesser

15. “Rumi says: Out beyond ideas of wrong doing and right doing There is a field. I’ll meet you there.”

— Elizabeth Lesser

16. “To be human is to be lost in the woods.”

— Elizabeth Lesser

17. “Not only must we follow the golden thread towards spiritual freedom, but we must also unravel the garden-variety twine that is wrapped tightly around our hearts and minds.”

— Elizabeth Lesser

18. “Life is like a school; one can learn, one can graduate, one can skip a grade or stay behind.”

— Elizabeth Lesser

19. “A broken heart is not the same as sadness. Sadness occurs when the heart is stone cold and lifeless. On the contrary, there is an unbelievable amount of vitality in a broken heart.”

— Elizabeth Lesser

20. “Adversity is a natural part of being human. It is the height of arrogance to prescribe a moral code or health regimen or spiritual practice as an amulet to keep things from falling apart.”

— Elizabeth Lesser

21. “Love is the secret you unmask yourself to find; it is the foundation of the spiritual life, the destination where all roads of the journey lead.”

— Elizabeth Lesser

22. “Life’s always changing. We always are being called to adapt.”

— Elizabeth Lesser

23. “The world needs women to redefine what it means to be a person of power.”

— Elizabeth Lesser

24. “If there is one thing that has made a difference in my life, it is the courage to turn and face what wants to change within me.”

— Elizabeth Lesser

25. “Even if your difficult time comes at you out of the blue – like cancer – even those times, opens your heart to the magic and power of life, and gives you this inner commitment to live every moment.”

— Elizabeth Lesser

26. “The last of the human freedoms is to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances. – VICTOR FRANKL.”

— Elizabeth Lesser

27. “I recently heard a great writer say that an essential element in the life of a writer is to have been an outsider in childhood, to have been given the “gift” of not belonging.”

— Elizabeth Lesser

28. “What mothers do – they act with love, at least good mothers do! They have a spirit of strong, fierce, protective energy – the way a mother would put her life on the line for her children – we need to put our life on the line for each other.”

— Elizabeth Lesser

29. “When you feel yourself breaking down, may you break open instead.”

— Elizabeth Lesser

30. “Agree to these ground rules: Be curious, conversational and real. Don’t persuade or interrupt. Listen, listen, listen.”

— Elizabeth Lesser

31. “What will matter is the good we did, not the good we expected others to do.”

— Elizabeth Lesser

32. “The Persian poet Rumi says, The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you. Don’t go back to sleep. You must ask for what you really want.”

— Elizabeth Lesser

33. “You always teach others what you most need to learn. You are your own worst student.”

— Elizabeth Lesser

34. “Beautiful quality that women have, which is we like to get together and gab. It’s time to elevate that aspect of being a woman.”

— Elizabeth Lesser

35. “If we do not suffer a loss all the way to the end, it will wait for us. It won’t just dissipate and disappear. Rather, it will fester, and we will experience its sorrow later, in stranger forms.”

— Elizabeth Lesser

36. “So much of what we do each day is a diversion from what our lives are really about. A traumatic event is like a knife slicing through our diversionary tactics and exposing the vein of truth – the truth of what we really want, of how we really feel, of the wrongs we have visited upon each other, of the love we crave from each other.”

— Elizabeth Lesser

37. “We have little control over the outer weather patterns as we make our way through the landscape of a life. But we can become masters of the inner landscape. We can use what happens on the outside to change the way we function on the inside.”

— Elizabeth Lesser

38. “Fear is a sneaky thief, stealing away precious moments of your life.”

— Elizabeth Lesser

39. “The soul is the river of energy that animates who we are.”

— Elizabeth Lesser

40. “Power is just using energy in a wise way to get things done. Power has been misinterpreted to mean getting my way on the backs of other people. Getting whatever I want, forgetting that there are other beings and species and energies involved.”

— Elizabeth Lesser

41. “Read any of the top-selling business books, all of them talk about moving away from a top down manner of leading to a more inclusive one. It’s not happening over night, but if you read the winds of change in most of the democracies in the world we are moving toward shared levels of power.”

— Elizabeth Lesser

42. “I think diversity of thinking and healing traditions from around the world are good for us. The movement itself has evolved enormously and it’s been a thrill to be part of it.”

— Elizabeth Lesser

43. “Each one of us regardless of our situation, is in our search of our most authentic, vital, generous and wise self.”

— Elizabeth Lesser

44. “It seems to be almost a law of physics, that the winds of change awaken fear and fundamentalism.”

— Elizabeth Lesser

45. “First we forgive ourselves, then we forgive others and life itself.”

— Elizabeth Lesser

46. “Over and over, we are broken on the shore of life. Our stubborn egos are knocked around, and our frightened hearts are broken open – not once, and not in predictable patterns, but in surprising ways and for as long as we live.”

— Elizabeth Lesser

47. “She says, “You will not grow if you sit in a beautiful flower garden, but you will grow if you are sick, if you are in pain, if you experience losses, and if you do not put your head in the sand, but take the pain as a gift to you with a very, very specific purpose.”

— Elizabeth Lesser

48. “Life is about change, it never stops, it’s moving and it’s moving this human body inexorably towards its demise.”

— Elizabeth Lesser

49. “It is the acceptance of death that has finally allowed me to choose life.”

— Elizabeth Lesser

50. “To me the purpose of life is to enjoy it! It’s to enjoy the gift, and to make sure that other people have an opportunity to enjoy the gift.”

— Elizabeth Lesser