Top 40 Jean Houston Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “No matter the situation, never let your emotions overpower your intelligence.”

— Jean Houston

2. “Human connections are deeply nurtured in the field of shared story.”

— Jean Houston

Featured in: Storytelling Quotes

3. “Change the story and you change perception; change perception and you change the world.”

— Jean Houston

4. “I am ready for the rest of my life to rise.”

— Jean Houston

5. “We all have the extraordinary coded within us, waiting to be released.”

— Jean Houston

6. “At the height of laughter, the universe is flung into a kaleidoscope of new possibilities.”

— Jean Houston

7. “I often wonder if you wrote your memoir today, if your life story would be lived on the edge of possibility, if you held wonder in one hand and courage in the other and truly believed that anything was possible.”

— Jean Houston

8. “You are not an encapsulated bag of skin dragging around a dreary little ego. You are an evolutionary wonder, a trillion cells singing together in a vast chorale, an organism – environment, a symbiosis of cell and soul.”

— Jean Houston

9. “Bangladesh is a world of metaphor, of high and low theater, of great poetry and music. You talk to a rice farmer and you find a poet. You get to know a sweeper of the streets and you find a remarkable singer.”

— Jean Houston

10. “The soul is the lure of our becoming.”

— Jean Houston

11. “The ecological crisis is doing what no other crisis in history has ever done – challenging us to a realization of a new humanity.”

— Jean Houston

12. “Your brain has one function-to do exactly what you tell it to do.”

— Jean Houston

13. “Occasionally we will be overwhelmed, but mostly we will be enchanted.”

— Jean Houston

14. “Now is the time when we must renew ourselves and live as if we and all of life is sacred, and as if everything we do makes a difference.”

— Jean Houston

15. “I don’t think that any great issue ever gets resolved. I think we outgrow them.”

— Jean Houston

16. “Ironically, we are all too often educated out of rather than in to an awareness of the body.”

— Jean Houston

17. “If you keep telling the same sad small story. You will keep living the same sad small life.”

— Jean Houston

18. “You are not a passive observer in the cosmos. The entire universe is expressing itself through you at this very moment.”

— Jean Houston

19. “Our senses are indeed our doors and windows on this world, in a very real sense the key to the unlocking of meaning and the wellspring of creativity.”

— Jean Houston

20. “Laughter is the loaded latency given us by nature as part of our native equipment to break up the stalemates of our lives and urge us on to deeper and more complex forms of knowing.”

— Jean Houston

21. “Try to spend a few moments each day holding a picture of your body and your mind in a state of splendid health.”

— Jean Houston

22. “There is something else that is trying to come through – that lure of becoming – and it does come from the realm of spirit, it does come from the quantum universe, it does come from the great spark that is the threshold of time and history trying to emerge and electrify us.”

— Jean Houston

23. “Development involves giving up a smaller story in order to wake up to a larger story.”

— Jean Houston

24. “As you allow the beloved to grow within you, you will discover a steadfastness to the spiritual journey.”

— Jean Houston

25. “I firmly believe that all human beings have access to extraordinary energies and powers. Judging from accounts of mystical experience, heightened creativity, or exceptional performance by athletes and artists, we harbor a greater life than we know.”

— Jean Houston

26. “We tend to think of the Faustian man, the one who fabricates, manipulates, seduces and ends up destroying. But the new image will be man the creator, the artist, the player.”

— Jean Houston

27. “We live in a description of reality.”

— Jean Houston

28. “A myth is something that never was but that is always happening.”

— Jean Houston

29. “The illuminated ones can take any form – a man, a woman, a child, an elder, or even a dog. It is not inconsequential that the English language allows for the dyslexia of the spelling of the word dog: God spelled backward.”

— Jean Houston

30. “When we are calling forth the depth and genius of the other, then we grow.”

— Jean Houston

31. “Just as you would not neglect seeds that you planted with hope that they will bear vegetables and fruits and flowers, so must you attend to nourish the garden of your becoming.”

— Jean Houston

32. “Stories are living and dynamic. Stories exist to be exchanged. They are the currency of Human Growth.”

— Jean Houston

33. “The world needs the sense that we are all in it TOGETHER!”

— Jean Houston

34. “Laughter lifts our spirits, surprises and sometime shocks our expectations, allows us to cross boundaries, reorders our priorities, and gives us access to ideas and associations we rarely ever thought to have.”

— Jean Houston

35. “Engaging it produces an intense force, which in turn produces a mutation in consciousness. You become who you really are...”

— Jean Houston

36. “Education and the process of educating is a total integral, contextual situation which includes students, teachers, parents, administration and environment.”

— Jean Houston

37. “The wounding becomes sacred when we are willing to release our old stories and to become the vehicles through which the new story may emerge into time.”

— Jean Houston

38. “The tendrils of a new, deeper form of spirituality are growing. It’s the greening under the surface crust of consciousness and social paradigm.”

— Jean Houston

39. “Wth subtly developed body awareness, it is possible for the individual to become the conscious orchestrator of health.”

— Jean Houston

40. “Pathos activates the eyes and ears to see and hear. At times of pathos, illness opens doors to a reality which is closed to a healthy point of view.”

— Jean Houston

41. “The ideas are secondary to the primary premise of people’s potential. I’m always in wonder and astonishment.”

— Jean Houston

42. “We are sitting on a cornucopia of knowing that we had no way to access as a democracy. We couldn’t get the democratization of the human capacity before our time.”

— Jean Houston

43. “Patricia Sun is a solar light of consciousness whose wisdom rays cover the world. Everywhere I travel through out the earth, I find people whose lives have been enhanced and transformed by her luminous work.”

— Jean Houston

44. “A normal person is someone that you don’t know very well.”

— Jean Houston

45. “We cannot embrace the New Mind by just sitting around and talking about it. It demands that we alter not just our thinking, but our way of living down to the smallest details.”

— Jean Houston

46. “Paul Brunton was a great original and got to a place of personal evolution that illumines the pathways of a future humanity.”

— Jean Houston

47. “Around my eighth or ninth year I became interested in the world’s religions. I was mathematically retarded but theologically precocious. I began to correspond with seikhs in India. After about the third letter they would ask about job opportunities in America.”

— Jean Houston

48. “I think civilization is going to get to a point where we suddenly become responsible, stewards of the whole evolutionary process. This requires domains of consciousness, not just levels and frequencies.”

— Jean Houston