Top 80 Michael Meade Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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

52. “The thread that ties us to the center is the hidden cord of the heart, it is the thread of genius that can connect the mind with the heart, that allows the mind to feel and reveals the thought set within the heart.”

— Michael Meade

53. “The purpose of conflict is to create.”

— Michael Meade

54. “Whereas literalists and fundamentalists tend to choose one pole of any dilemma or opposition, whereas modern political parties and religious groups tend towards demonizing each other, the creative individual must be born again and again in the crucible created by the tension between opposing instincts, conflicted feelings, and contrasting ideas.”

— Michael Meade

55. “At critical moments the veil between the little-self and the deep self thins and a meaningful self-adjustment becomes possible. If a person does not become paralyzed with fear or frozen in hatred, the wise self hidden within will rise to the occasion.”

— Michael Meade

56. “Human beings long for connection, and our sense of usefulness derives from the feeling of connectedness. When we are connected – to our own purpose, to the community around us, and to our spiritual wisdom – we are able to live and act with authentic effectiveness.”

— Michael Meade

57. “Inside each one of us there is a mostly hidden, mostly golden, mostly eternal image or aspect of being, similar to the gold that is buried in the earth. We are the earthlings, the children of the earth, and therefore we are a replica, in a sense, of the earth itself. One of the ideas that is important is: As above, so below. As outside, so within.”

— Michael Meade

58. “Each life involves an essential errand; not simply the task of survival, but a life-mission embedded in the soul from the beginning.”

— Michael Meade

59. “If we want the world to change, the healing of culture and greater balance in nature, it has to start inside the human soul.”

— Michael Meade

60. “The old idea is that when tragedy strikes or when an obstacle blocks us, there are only two possibilities. We either become a smaller person or we become a bigger person. If it’s a real life change you cannot come out the same. So therefore, you’re either going to come out smaller or you are going to rise up and ultimately come out of it a bigger person.”

— Michael Meade

61. “To become nobody but your true self and to struggle against the tide of sameness and the false security of simply fitting in is a fight worth having. To become oneself by contributing one’s native gifts and talents to this troubled world: that is the job to keep applying for and a work worth spending an entire life doing.”

— Michael Meade

62. “A certain kind of courage is required to follow what truly calls to us; why else would so many choose to live within false certainties and pretensions of security? If genuine treasures were easy to find this world would be a different place. If the path of dreams were easy to walk or predictable to follow many more would go that route. The truth is that most prefer the safer paths in life even if they know that their souls are called another way.”

— Michael Meade

63. “When a situation feels like a matter of life and death the deep self is close at hand and it already carries inner medicine and its own life remedy.”

— Michael Meade

64. “What good is a dream that doesn’t test the mettle of the dreamer? What good is a path that doesn’t carry us to the edge of our capacity and then beyond that place? A true calling involves a great exposure before it can become a genuine refuge.”

— Michael Meade

65. “There is a poem at the heart of things and a mythic story in the heart of each of us.”

— Michael Meade

66. “Whether we know it or not, our lives are acts of imagination and the world is continually re-imagined through us.”

— Michael Meade

67. “The only choice once your world has been torn apart is to find your genius and live with that. ‘Normal’ is out of the question. The healing for veterans, or anyone going through great tragedy, is finding your natural spirit and your genius that was waiting to be found. That can now become the cohering principle in your life. The idea of patching someone up and back into normal when they’ve had extremely abnormal experiences is a misunderstanding.”

— Michael Meade

68. “Liberation happens each time we become conscious of the contents of the soul.”

— Michael Meade

69. “Unless a person learns of the sacred intentions in their own life it will be difficult for them to understand the sacred presence in all of life.”

— Michael Meade

70. “The real education is when you awaken and nourish and guide the inner spirit, this inner genius. The community grows from the giving of the gifts of the people in it, which is really giving from the genius.”

— Michael Meade

71. “Life roars at us when it wants or needs us to change. Ultimately, change means trans formation, a shifting from one form to another that involves the magic of creation. The trouble with entrenched oppositions is that each side becomes increasingly one-sided and single minded and unable to grow or meaningfully change. In the blindness of fear and the willfulness of abstract beliefs, people forget or reject the unseen yet essential unity that underlies all the oppositions in life.”

— Michael Meade

72. “Searching outside oneself for what can only be found within can lead to a life lived in the wrong direction and sacrifices made for the wrong reasons. People can wind up alienated from themselves even if they achieve lofty goals set by others.”

— Michael Meade

73. “What is most lacking in the modern world of duplications and facsimiles, of endless information and intentional misinformation, is the authenticity that makes life truly meaningful and spiritually rewarding.”

— Michael Meade

74. “At critical junctures, outer trouble and the inner need to grow conspire to set each of us on a path of awakening and initiation.”

— Michael Meade

75. “A genuine education must somehow serve the wings of spirit and imagination that each child brings to life.”

— Michael Meade

76. “Our deepest longings and the question of who we are intended to be cuts us in half, dividing us within ourselves. At critical stages and significant moments in the course of life, we sink with the weight of our own questions; we drown in our own psyche in order to reach a subtle ground that secretly sustains our every breath. In that sense, all separations, splits, and conflicts are evidence of a unity we long to find, both individually and collectively.”

— Michael Meade

77. “Myths are intended to break the spell of time and release us from the immediate pressures and limitations of daily life.”

— Michael Meade

78. “We are wrapped around a mystery to which we were drawn before we were born.”

— Michael Meade

79. “If we meet a myth with our lives and deepest concerns, the mythic oracles speak directly to us. Myths are oracular in the sense that each person can receive a message or an insight that relates to their life circumstances. The point has never been to “believe” in myths or to simply accept what others have said they mean. The key issue with mythic images is to let them speak to us, wherever and whenever we find ourselves seeking guidance, permission, or understanding.”

— Michael Meade

80. “The hardest thing in life may be to learn to truly trust that there is something noble and generative in ourselves. This is a greater sense of the notion of believing in our self; to truly believe in oneself means to uncover the inner core of imagination and authenticity that can also be called the genius within us. When we connect to the inner resident of the soul, we also learn how we are woven to the Soul of the World.”

— Michael Meade

81. “In the end, as at the beginning, the divine turns out to be most interested in the unique life of the individual soul. That’s what was meant by the old idea that “inside people is where god learns.” This is not a religious notion, but more of a spiritual insight. For this conversation god is simply the shortest way to refer to the divine. When a unique life becomes fully livedeveryone involved learns something and it becomes clear that god was involved all along.”

— Michael Meade

82. “If a man does not know the wounds of his own soul, he can deny not just his own pain, but also be unmoved by the suffering of other people. More than that, he will tend to put his wound onto others. He may only be able to see the wound that secretly troubles him when he forcefully projects it into someone else, in forms of abuse or violence.”

— Michael Meade

83. “Soul is found where life deepens us, where meaning calls to us, where trouble deters us, wherever and however we slow down in the midst of the rushing and racing at the surface level of life.”

— Michael Meade

84. “When it comes to the human soul, the real battle is the struggle to truly become oneself. Not the self that others might want us to be, not even the self that we might wish to be; but the deep self and inner soul trying to awaken at critical crossroads in each life.”

— Michael Meade

85. “A community best serves itself when it truly serves the awakening of the unique story trying to come to life through each person born.”

— Michael Meade

86. “Something watches over us and we know it when we follow the little voice inside or heed the warning or inspiration that arrives as if on wings. We need the intermediaries that keep us close to the spirit of life, to the wonders of nature and to the subtleties of our own inner nature.”

— Michael Meade

87. “Where reason fails and logic stumbles, myth waits to open paths of imagination and understanding.”

— Michael Meade

88. “Our answer, our opportunity, our chance to change the world has to come from the poetry that is already written on the walls of the soul.”

— Michael Meade