Top 100 Ken Wilber Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Be the most ethical, the most responsible, the most authentic you can be with every breath you take, because you are cutting a path into tomorrow that others will follow.”

— Ken Wilber

Featured in: Conscience Quotes

2. “Nobody is smart enough to be wrong all the time.”

— Ken Wilber

3. “There is intersubjectivity woven into the very fabric of the Kosmos at all levels.”

— Ken Wilber

4. “The understanding of “evolutionary consciousness” is perhaps the most important thing lacking in spiritual practices today. Evolution means growth and development. This means that there are aspects of reality that have not yet arisen in our consciousness. But they will arise if we grow.”

— Ken Wilber

5. “To understand the whole it is necessary to understand the parts. To understand the parts, it is necessary to understand the whole. Such is the circle of understanding.”

— Ken Wilber

6. “Authentic spirituality is revolutionary. It does not legitimate the world, it breaks the world; it does not console the world, it shatters it. And it does not render the self content, it renders it undone.”

— Ken Wilber

7. “Put bluntly, the ego is not an obstruction to Spirit, but a radiant manifestation of Spirit. All Forms are not other than Emptiness, including the form of the ego. It is not necessary to get rid of the ego, but simply to live with it a certain exuberance.”

— Ken Wilber

8. “Whenever we moderns pause for a moment, and enter the silence, and listen very carefully, the glimmer of our deepest nature begins to shine forth, and we are introduced to the mysteries of the deep, the call of the within, the infinite radiance of a splendor that time and space forgot.”

— Ken Wilber

9. “I don’t have to agree with everything you say, but I should attempt at least to understand it, for the opposite of mutual understanding is, quite simply, war.”

— Ken Wilber

10. “I rise to taste the dawn, and find that love alone will shine today.”

— Ken Wilber

11. “Boundary lines, of any type, are never found in the real world itself, but only in the imagination of the mapmakers.”

— Ken Wilber

12. “The integral sage, the nondual sage, is here to show us otherwise. Known generally as “Tantric,” these sages insist on transcending life by living it. They insist on finding release by engagement, finding nirvana in the midst of samsara, finding total liberation by complete immersion.”

— Ken Wilber

13. “Freedom is an endless meeting.”

— Ken Wilber

14. “A natural hierarchy is simply an order of increasing wholeness, such as: particles to atoms to cells to organisms, or letters to words to sentences to paragraphs. The whole of one level becomes part of the whole of the next. In other words, natural hierarchies are composed of holons.”

— Ken Wilber

15. “You cannot have exterior development without interior development to hold it in place.”

— Ken Wilber

16. “If you really want to change the world, you must first understand it adequately, or all you will do is reproduce in larger numbers your own ignorance.”

— Ken Wilber

17. “The truth will not necessarily set you free, but truthfulness will.”

— Ken Wilber

18. “The point is to unify the opposites, both positive and negative, by discovering a ground which transcends and encompasses both.”

— Ken Wilber

19. “Do you even recognize your own consciousness?”

— Ken Wilber

20. “This present moment, since it knows neither past nor future, is itself timeless, and that which is timeless is Eternal. Thus “the eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.”

— Ken Wilber

21. “There is a way out, but the way out is really a way within.”

— Ken Wilber

22. “The mystics ask you to take nothing on mere belief. Rather, they give you a set of experiments to test in your own awareness and experience. The laboratory is your own mind, the experiment is meditation.”

— Ken Wilber

23. “As Aurobindo and Teilhard de Chardin knew, the future of humankind is God-consciousness.”

— Ken Wilber

24. “Evolution does not isolate us from the rest of the Kosmos, it unites us with the rest of the Kosmos: the same currents that produced birds from dust and poetry from rocks produce egos from ids and sages from egos.”

— Ken Wilber

25. “I have one major rule: Everybody is right. More specifically, everybody – including me – has some important pieces of truth, and all of those pieces need to be honored, cherished, and included in a more gracious, spacious, and compassionate embrace.”

— Ken Wilber

26. “There are spiritual patterns at work in the universe and these announce themselves with impressive regularity wherever human minds and hearts attempt to attune themselves to the cosmos in all its radiant dimensions.”

— Ken Wilber

27. “What is it in you that brings you to a spiritual teacher in the first place? It’s not the spirit in you, since that is already enlightened, and has no need to seek. No, it is the ego in you that brings you to a teacher.”

— Ken Wilber

28. “An integral approach acknowledges that all views have a degree of truth, but some views are more true than others, more developed, more evolved, more adequate.”

— Ken Wilber

29. “We must forgive each other our arising, for our existence always torments others. The golden rule in the midst of this mutual misery has always been, not to do no harm, but as little as possible; and not to love one another, but as much as you can.”

— Ken Wilber

30. “The more I go into I, the more I fall out of I.”

— Ken Wilber

31. “Unhappiness and dissatisfaction with life are not signs of mental illness, but of growing intelligence.”

— Ken Wilber

32. “In the dream state, the mind and soul are set free to create as they please, to imagine vast worlds not tied to gross sensory realities but reaching out, almost magically, to touch other souls, other people and far-off places, wild and radiant images cascading to the rhythm of the heart’s desire.”

— Ken Wilber

33. “This is the world of One Taste, with no inside and no outside, no subject and no object, no in here versus out there, without means, without path and without goal. And this, as Ramana said, is the final truth.”

— Ken Wilber

34. “Prana is implicate to matter but explicate to mind; mind is implicate to prana but explicate to soul; soul is implicate to mind but explicate to spirit; and the spirit is the source and suchness of the entire sequence.”

— Ken Wilber

35. “The truth is an arbitrary, shifting, culturally relative, and historically molded phenomenon.”

— Ken Wilber

36. “The nondual universe of One Taste arises as a spontaneous gesture of your own true nature.”

— Ken Wilber

37. “One’s sanctions for truth and goodness are established largely by individual preferences.”

— Ken Wilber

38. “Science is clearly one of the most profound methods that humans have yet devised for discovering truth, while religion remains the single greatest force for generating meaning.”

— Ken Wilber

39. “Religion is just coded spirituality.”

— Ken Wilber

40. “The integral vision embodies an attempt to take the best of both worlds, ancient and modern. But that demands a critical stance willing to reject unflinchingly the worst of both as well.”

— Ken Wilber

41. “And resting in the ocean, dipped into the sea, I find glimmers of One Taste everywhere.”

— Ken Wilber

42. “A full-spectrum approach to human consciousness and behavior means that men and women have available to them a spectrum of knowing -a spectrum that includes, at the very least, the eye of flesh, the eye of mind, and the eye of spirit.”

— Ken Wilber

43. “Love is a time-honored way to transcend the separate-self sense and leap into the sublime; Treya and I held hands, closed our eyes, and jumped.”

— Ken Wilber

44. “Eternity is not ever-lasting time but the real, unfading, indestructible, and timeless Present, for, as Schroedinger said, the present is the only thing that has no end.”

— Ken Wilber

45. “Saving the biosphere depends first and foremost on human beings reaching mutual understanding and unforced agreement as to common ends. And that intersubjective accord occurs only in the noosphere. Anything short of that noospheric accord will continue to destroy the biosphere.”

— Ken Wilber

46. “Meditation, then, is not so much a part of this or that particular religion, but rather part of the universal spiritual culture of all humankind – an effort to bring awareness to bear on all aspects of life. It is, in other words, part of what has been called the perennial philosophy.”

— Ken Wilber

47. “Physics is the most fundamental, and least significant, of the sciences.”

— Ken Wilber

48. “There is nothing but God, nothing but the Goddess, nothing but Spirit in all directions, and not a grain of sand, not a speck of dust, is more or less Spirit than any other.”

— Ken Wilber

49. “In Democracy, man exploits man; in Communism, it’s the other way round.”

— Ken Wilber

50. “When the thunder roars, do you not hear your Self? When the lightening cracks, do you not see your Self? When clouds float quietly across the sky, is this not your very own limitless Being, waving back at you?”

— Ken Wilber