Top 120 Elizabeth Lesser Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “We stood in silence, and then the long-haired man repeated, “You are in pain. Do you know why?” “No, why?” I asked, even though I certainly did know why. “Because you are afraid.” “Afraid of what?” “Afraid of yourself,” the man said, placing his hand on his chest and patting his heart. “You are afraid to feel your real feelings. You are afraid to want what you really want. What do you want?”

— Elizabeth Lesser

102. “There is meaning hidden in the small changes of everyday life, and wisdom to be found in the shards of your most broken moments.”

— Elizabeth Lesser

103. “Twice-Born people use the difficult changes in their outer lives to make the harder changes within.”

— Elizabeth Lesser

104. “What is keeping you from feeling the rapture? I can assure you, you won’t find the answer in a lighted room. What stands between you and a full-bodied life can be found only in the shadows.”

— Elizabeth Lesser

105. “Meditation practice is like piano scales, basketball drills, ballroom dance class. Practice requires discipline; it can be tedious; it is necessary. After you have practiced enough, you become more skilled at the art form itself. You do not practice to become a great scale player or drill champion. You practice to become a musician or athlete. Likewise, 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

106. “I hope this is the lesson we women really commit to memory – we learned that it doesn’t work to try be someone other than who you really are.”

— Elizabeth Lesser

107. “Instead of fixating on the physical aspects of aging, it’s good to contemplate the deeper source of our anxiety. That can be liberating.”

— Elizabeth Lesser

108. “If you’re interested in the door to the heavens opening, start with the door to your own secret self.”

— Elizabeth Lesser

109. “Only people who claim their own voice can hear the true song of another.”

— Elizabeth Lesser

110. “If all we do is immerse ourselves in the stories of bad people doing bad things to each other and the planet, we will sink under the weight of a lopsided story.”

— Elizabeth Lesser

111. “I can only do what I do with a spirit of humor, and faith and give the controls over to something else.”

— Elizabeth Lesser

112. “It’s important to understand the significance of how our society’s origin story is based in blame. It’s good to contemplate what our culture would be like if the first woman had not been branded as “second born, first to sin.” How would things be different if humankind’s first big mistake wasn’t to follow the lead of the woman? And if Eden’s punishment hadn’t been subservience to Adam?”

— Elizabeth Lesser

113. “To turn back is one kind of death; to go forward is another.”

— Elizabeth Lesser

114. “Everyone has a burden to bear, and no one else can carry it for us. It’s our very own chimidunchik.” “That.”

— Elizabeth Lesser

115. “The fruit of prayer is the realization that life is an eternal adventure, and that we are explorers, always changing, always learning, always breaking open into new vistas of clarity and peace.”

— Elizabeth Lesser

116. “I didn’t want to become anything other than my most vibrant, peaceful, and grateful self.”

— Elizabeth Lesser

117. “The world wold have been different – and better – if women had had an equal say in the development of literature, medicine, chemistry, physics, peace and economics. Better, not because women are better, but because they are more than half of humanity, representing more than half of what it means to be human.”

— Elizabeth Lesser

118. “I have come to trust the power of a few well-chosen words to reveal to the world something I cannot say, or don’t want to say, or didn’t even know I needed to say until I saw it spelled out in front of me in the prophetic hand of the poet.”

— Elizabeth Lesser

119. “If only people realized what they had in life,” she told me one day, “they would not be able to contain their joy!”

— Elizabeth Lesser

120. “Face your embarrassment at being human, and you’ll uncover a deep well of passion and compassion. It’s a great power, your Open Secret. When your heart is undefended, you make it safe for whomever you meet to put down his burden of hiding, and then you both can walk through the open door.”

— Elizabeth Lesser

121. “Women are at the forefront of that kind of revolution now – a paradigm shift away from a gendered value system where the male experience is at the center of reality and all other ways of being, thinking, feeling, and doing are at the periphery.”

— Elizabeth Lesser

122. “I have gone back to sleep in order to resist the forces of change. And I have stayed awake and been broken open. Both ways are difficult, but one way brings with it the gift of a lifetime. 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

123. “What if our myths and teaching tales had purposely led humanity to believe that it was the ultimate sign of strength to nurture and love? What if the urge to care for children and nature and each other had been chosen as the most important tasks of any society? What if care as opposed to conquest had been the marker of virility? What if resources were granted to the people most skilled at peace making, healing, creating and opposed to those with brute strength and a pension for violence?”

— Elizabeth Lesser

124. “The basic belief of feminism is not that women are right and men are wrong; It is merely that women are people and therefor their voices matter, their values matter and their stories matter. It’s time for women to tell their versions of what it means to be fully human. It is time for men to respect those insights and it is time for all of us to integrate them into a new story of power.”

— Elizabeth Lesser

125. “Let’s put aside the goal of doing it perfectly, and replace it with the trust that we can do it differently.”

— Elizabeth Lesser

126. “When it no longer would destroy a boy to be likened to a girl, when a girl feels vital doing the things she values, when it’s considered as brave to be womanly as it is to be manly, than boys and girls, man and women can break out of the boxes that constrain us all.”

— Elizabeth Lesser

127. “Ch-ch-Changes, turn and face the strain, because I am trying to do just that.”

— Elizabeth Lesser

128. “T. S. Eliot says, “The end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”

— Elizabeth Lesser

129. “So,” I asked again, “if mistakes provide the best opportunity for discovery and evolution, why do we go around trying to look so sure of ourselves all the time?” I invited the crowd of left-brain thinkers to put.”

— Elizabeth Lesser

130. “That’s why we tell the stories. To ease the anxiety of being soft-skinned mortals. To inspire the soul to fathom eternity. To give order to what feels out of control. To guide, to blame, to warn, to shame. To make some kind of sense out of why people do what they do, why things happen the way they happen, and how we might all meet each other and daily life with less turmoil and more stability. That’s why we cling to the old stories.”

— Elizabeth Lesser

131. “From bars and bleachers to media panels and the halls of government, it’s men who do more of the talking. This has been going on for a long, long time – women being accused of talking too much, even as men often dominate conversations, interrupt, mansplain, and do more of the sum total of all human talking.”

— Elizabeth Lesser

132. “So much of the sorry state of our world hangs on the excess of the so-called masculine virtues in our guiding storylines.”

— Elizabeth Lesser