Top 80 Michael Meade Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “There’s an African proverb: ‘When death finds you, may it find you alive.’ Alive means living your own damned life, not the life that your parents wanted, or the life some cultural group or political party wanted, but the life that your own soul wants to live.”

— Michael Meade

Featured in: Focus On Yourself Quotes, Be Yourself Quotes

2. “While you had the chance to live, did you become your true self?”

— Michael Meade

3. “The ship is always off course. Anybody who sails knows that. Sailing is being off course and correcting. That gives a sense of what life is about.”

— Michael Meade

4. “The home we are looking for in this world is within us all along. The lost home that we are seeking is ourselves; it is the story we carry within our soul.”

— Michael Meade

5. “A false sense of security is the only kind there is.”

— Michael Meade

6. “The desire to be part of something greater and to occupy life more fully, is also a desire to touch and be touched by the living imagination that sustains each soul and all of life.”

— Michael Meade

7. “Each person is a story that the Soul of the World wants to tell to itself.”

— Michael Meade

8. “Trouble is another word for fate; what troubles us the most is what we are fated to one day face. What troubles us in youth will return at each crossroad in life because it secretly seeks to provoke a deep awakening to the unique way that we are intended to live.”

— Michael Meade

9. “A true calling is aimed at the genius qualities already set within each person...”

— Michael Meade

10. “Wisdom can reveal the light hidden in dark times; but it requires that we face the darkness in ourselves. People may desire pearls of wisdom, yet most are unwilling to descend to the depths where the pearls wait to be found. Wisdom involves a necessary descent into the depths of life, for that alone can produce ‘lived knowledge’ and a unified vision.”

— Michael Meade

11. “To be purposeful is not to be goal oriented, but to seek to reconnect to the source of one’s life.”

— Michael Meade

12. “When you step further into the story you came to live, not only does the mythic territory open, but the deep self moves and the world of imagination and meaning comes towards you.”

— Michael Meade

13. “The problem in most situations is not a lack of calling; but a fear of responding to the call.”

— Michael Meade

14. “Mythic imagination can break the spell of time and open us to a level of life that remains timeless. Myth is not about what happened in past times; myth is about what happens to people all of the time.”

— Michael Meade

15. “Everyone gets wounded in this world and everyone has within them some golden qualities that can serve to heal the wounds of time and the traumatic effects of human tragedy.”

— Michael Meade

16. “The issue is not simply one of needing to save the world, but also of needing to solve the problem of the loss of soul throughout the modern world. Part of what has been lost in the reckless rushing of modernity is the sense that each life has an authentic interior that shelters important emotions as well as inherent purpose, and that the dignity of existence includes a necessary instinct to unfold the unique story woven inside each living soul.”

— Michael Meade

17. “Fear is an old word that derives from the same roots that give us “fare,” as in “thoroughfare.” Although it often causes people to run away from troubling situations, at a deeper level, fear means “to go through it.” The hidden purpose of fear involves bringing us closer to natural instincts for survival, but also for awakening inner resources and sharpening our intelligence when faced with true danger and the basic need to change.”

— Michael Meade

18. “In the end, what we fear will not go away, for it indicates what we must go through in order to awaken, become more genuine, and live more fully. The problem is that we tend to be most afraid of what our own souls require of us. Often our deepest fear is that we might become who we are intended to be, who we already are at our core. For becoming who we truly are requires the greatest amount of change.”

— Michael Meade

19. “Genius is the basis for the deepest type of mentoring. When true learning occurs genius teaches genius and both the teacher and the student grow.”

— Michael Meade

20. “Run towards the roar,’ the old people used to tell the young ones. When faced with great danger and when people panic and seek a false sense of safety, run towards the roaring and go where you fear to go. For only in facing your fears can you find some safety and a way through. When the world rattles and the end seems near, go towards the roar.”

— Michael Meade

21. “In order to understand the conditions we are in, we must place ourselves not in the mainstream of life but in the timeless stream of myth. As the fabric of life loosens, the veil between this world of hard facts and the otherworld of great imagination also becomes thinner and more permeable. Just as time seems to be running out, timeless things try to slip back into human awareness.”

— Michael Meade

22. “The gift within the gift involved the opening of an inner eye that changed how I looked at life.”

— Michael Meade

23. “The human soul is a living paradox – neither a predetermined personality nor a completely open possibility. The point in this life is not simply to “become somebody,” but to become who we were each intended to be when we first entered this world. For each of us has the most to give and contributes most meaningfully when we become who we were intended to be from the beginning. That is the inside story and the hidden message that has been etched upon each soul.”

— Michael Meade

24. “When a culture simply shrugs about what happens to people in war, it breaks the fragile sequence, the bond between all people.”

— Michael Meade

25. “The genius inside a person wants activity. It’s connected to the stars; it’s connected to a spark and it wants to burn and it wants to make and it wants to create and it has gifts to give. That is the nature of inner genius.”

— Michael Meade

26. “A true pilgrimage requires letting go of the very things most people try to hold onto. In seeking after what the soul desires, we become pilgrims with no home but the path the soul would have us follow.”

— Michael Meade

27. “Set within the seed of the soul is not jut a fleeting image or a vague pattern but a lifelong story enfolded within, waiting to be cracked open and lived all the way out.”

— Michael Meade

28. “Everyone who enters the world comes in with hidden gold, it’s called your natural gifts. The job of a person is to find the hidden gold and give it. It turns out that when you give it you get more than when you hold on to it, that’s the economy of the soul.”

— Michael Meade

29. “Healing is a revolutionary act and we are here to awaken to the true nature of our own souls and the gifts we have to give to the world.”

— Michael Meade

30. “Myth and nature are the two great garments of the world, with nature being the living green garment that covers the planet and myth being the multidimensional, many-colored fabric that continually weaves human culture.”

— Michael Meade

31. “There is a greater will, a greater need and purpose hidden within each life, and there is an inner law that knows best how each must live and that is worth stealing for; it’s worth dying for, and worth living for as well.”

— Michael Meade

32. “When a person becomes aware of their genius and they live it and they give generously from it, they change the world, they affect the world. And when they depart everyone knows something is missing.”

— Michael Meade

33. “As a culture, we turn away from people just when they are in times of change. That’s when most communities used to embrace people, so the individual and the culture both benefited.”

— Michael Meade

34. “Some might ask whether the path is before us or within us. The answer is: Yes. We are both driven from within by our resident spirit and something outside calls forth the genius within us.”

— Michael Meade

35. “Our job is not to comprehend or control everything, but to learn which story we are in and which of the many things calling out in the world is calling to us. Our job is to be fully alive in the life we have, to pick up the invisible thread of our own story and follow where it leads. Our job is to find the thread of our own dream and live it all the way to the end.”

— Michael Meade

36. “Fate and destiny are close woven within us and near them can be found the true genius of our lives.”

— Michael Meade

37. “Every mistake is a new style.”

— Michael Meade

38. “We may be closest to hearing the call when we feel most alone or in trouble, for genius hides behind the wound and one of the greatest wounds in life is to not know who we are intended to be or what we are supposed to serve in life.”

— Michael Meade

39. “During youth a blossoming and budding forth tries to happen from inside out as each young person encounters what is seeded in them and gifted in their soul.”

— Michael Meade

40. “Something deep in the human soul awakens as things fall apart. Something in the soul knows that everything in this world can become lost. And something in the soul knows how to survive periods of devastation, disorientation and loss. Descent and falling is the way of the soul from its beginning. We each fell from the womb of life when the waters of the inner sea broke and it came time for us to breathe on our own.”

— Michael Meade

41. “The wound in one person can become the door through which everyone can find the center of life again.”

— Michael Meade

42. “Timing can be everything and wisdom requires the patience to wait as well as the courage to leap when the time becomes right.”

— Michael Meade

43. “If we want the world to change, it has to start inside the human soul.”

— Michael Meade

44. “In seeking after what the soul desires we become pilgrims with no home but the path the soul would have us follow.”

— Michael Meade

45. “If you don’t know who you are, anyone can name you.”

— Michael Meade

46. “Once a person falls in the fields of love, all the rules are already broken; the lover becomes open an exalted in ways that transcend the local issues as well as the commonly held beliefs. Love, like genuine devotion, will find a way. Where duty becomes replaced with love, a greater and deeper faith will blossom forth.”

— Michael Meade

47. “Living myth is about the experience of the waters parting again in the here and now. As a critical moment opens before us the spirit of life and genius of the soul speaks to us and through us. What was about to crush us suddenly parts before us and we shoot forward with the sudden vitality of life, fueled by the living imagination needed to survive.”

— Michael Meade

48. “Hearing a story awakens the mythic story living in each of us. It places us in a “mythic condition” that reconnects us to the core imagination and living story at the center of our soul. Being touched by myth carries us to the center where the world is always ending and always beginning again.”

— Michael Meade

49. “All meaningful change requires a genuine surrender. Yet, to surrender does not simply mean to give up; more to give up one’s usual self and allow something other to enter and redeem the lesser sense of self. In surrendering, we fall to the bottom of our arguments and seek to touch the origin of our lives again. Only then can we see as we were meant to see, from the depth of the psyche where the genius resides, where the seeds of wisdom and purpose were planted before we were born.”

— Michael Meade

50. “Mentoring is an archetypal activity that has timeless elements which can connect us to the universal ground where nature renews itself and culture becomes reimagined. Youth and elder meet where the pressure of the future meets the presence of the past. Old and young are opposites that secretly identify with each other; for neither fits well into the mainstream of life.”

— Michael Meade