Top 90 Rachel Naomi Remen Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Helping, fixing, and serving represent three different ways of seeing life. When you help, you see life as weak. When you fix, you see life as broken. When you serve, you see life as whole. Fixing and helping may be the work of the ego, and service the work of the soul.”

— Rachel Naomi Remen

Featured in: Service Quotes, Healing Quotes

2. “Being safe is about being seen and heard and allowed to be who you are and to speak your truth.”

— Rachel Naomi Remen

3. “When you listen generously to people they can hear the truth in themselves, often for the first time.”

— Rachel Naomi Remen

4. “Grieving allows us to heal, to remember with love rather than pain. It is a sorting process. One by one you let go of the things that are gone and you mourn for them. One by one you take hold of the things that have become a part of who you are and build again.”

— Rachel Naomi Remen

5. “Healing may not be so much about getting better, as about letting go of everything that isn’t you – all of the expectations, all of the beliefs – and becoming who you are.”

— Rachel Naomi Remen

6. “The willingness to consider possibility requires a tolerance of uncertainty.”

— Rachel Naomi Remen

7. “A loving silence often has more power to heal and to connect than the most well-intentioned words.”

— Rachel Naomi Remen

8. “Most of us lead far more meaningful lives than we know. Often finding meaning is not about doing things differently; it is about seeing familiar things in new ways.”

— Rachel Naomi Remen

9. “The most basic and powerful way to connect to another person is to listen. Just listen.”

— Rachel Naomi Remen

10. “Silence is a place of great power and healing.”

— Rachel Naomi Remen

11. “The secret of living well is not in having all the answers but in pursuing unanswerable questions in good company.”

— Rachel Naomi Remen

12. “Our purpose in life is to grow in wisdom and in love.”

— Rachel Naomi Remen

13. “Perhaps the most important thing we ever give each other is our attention.”

— Rachel Naomi Remen

14. “Facts bring us to knowledge, but stories lead to wisdom.”

— Rachel Naomi Remen

15. “Anger is just a demand for change, a passionate wish for things to be different.”

— Rachel Naomi Remen

16. “It has been my experience that presence is a more powerful catalyst for change than analysis.”

— Rachel Naomi Remen

17. “Our wounds are our sources of growth.”

— Rachel Naomi Remen

18. “Life offers its wisdom generously. Everything teaches. Not everyone learns.”

— Rachel Naomi Remen

19. “At the deepest level, the creative process and the healing process arise from a single source. When you are an artist, you are a healer; a wordless trust of the same mystery is the foundation of your work and its integrity.”

— Rachel Naomi Remen

20. “I don’t think there’s such a thing as a bad emotion. The only bad emotion is a stuck emotion.”

— Rachel Naomi Remen

21. “An unanswered question is a fine traveling companion. It sharpens your eye for the road.”

— Rachel Naomi Remen

22. “When we pray, we don’t change the world, we change ourselves.”

— Rachel Naomi Remen

23. “Our listening creates a sanctuary for the homeless parts within another person.”

— Rachel Naomi Remen

24. “Often times of crisis are times of discovery, periods when we cannot maintain our old ways of doing things and enter into a steep learning curve. Sometimes it takes a crisis to initiate growth.”

— Rachel Naomi Remen

25. “Life is known only by those who have found a way to be comfortable with change and the unknown. Given the nature of life, there may be no security, but only adventure.”

— Rachel Naomi Remen

26. “Suffering shapes the life force, sometimes into anger, sometimes into blame and self-pity. Eventually it may show us the wisdom of embracing and loving life.”

— Rachel Naomi Remen

27. “Few perfectionists can tell the difference between love and approval. Perfectionism is so widespread in this culture that we actually have had to invent another word for love. ‘Unconditional love,’ we say. Yet, all love is unconditional. Anything else is just approval.”

— Rachel Naomi Remen

28. “We burn out not because we don’t care but because we don’t grieve. We burn out because we have allowed our hearts to become so filled with loss that we have no room left to care.”

— Rachel Naomi Remen

29. “Grieving is a way of self-care.”

— Rachel Naomi Remen

30. “The way towards freedom from a situation often lies in acceptance of the situation.”

— Rachel Naomi Remen

31. “Inner peace is more a question of cultivating perspective, meaning, and wisdom even as life touches you with its pain.”

— Rachel Naomi Remen

32. “Belief traps or frees us.”

— Rachel Naomi Remen

33. “When we know ourselves to be connected to all others, acting compassionately is simply the natural thing to do.”

— Rachel Naomi Remen

34. “Fear is the friction in all transitions.”

— Rachel Naomi Remen

35. “Religion is a bridge to the spiritual, but the spiritual lies beyond religion.”

— Rachel Naomi Remen

36. “The places in which we are seen and heard are holy places. They remind us of our value as human beings. They give us the strength to go on.”

— Rachel Naomi Remen

37. “A shaman is someone who has a wound that will not heal. He sits by the side of the road with his open wound exposed.”

— Rachel Naomi Remen

38. “In the silence of listening, you can know yourself in everyone, the unseen singing softly to itself and to you.”

— Rachel Naomi Remen

39. “The wisdom in the story of the most educated and powerful person is often not greater than the wisdom in the story of a child, and the life of a child can teach us as much as the life of a sage.”

— Rachel Naomi Remen

40. “I suspect that the most basic and powerful way to connect with another person is to listen. Just listen. Perhaps the most important thing we ever give each other is our attention. And especially if it’s from the heart. When people are talking, there’s no need to do anything but receive them. Just take them in. Listen to what they’re saying. Care about it. Most times caring about it is even more important than understanding it.”

— Rachel Naomi Remen

41. “A blessing is not something that one person gives another. A blessing is a moment of meeting, a certain kind of relationship in which both people involved remember and acknowledge their true nature and worth, and strengthen what is whole in one another.”

— Rachel Naomi Remen

42. “Perhaps wisdom is simply a matter of waiting, and healing a question of time. And anything good you’ve ever been given is yours forever.”

— Rachel Naomi Remen

43. “What we do to survive is often different from what we may need to do in order to live.”

— Rachel Naomi Remen

44. “Those who bless and serve life find a place of belonging and strength, a refuge.”

— Rachel Naomi Remen

45. “I have no idea about what death is, but because I have been in association with it so intimately, I have a much greater sense of the value of life and of what life can be.”

— Rachel Naomi Remen

46. “Befriending life is less a matter of knowledge than a question of wisdom. It is not about mastering life, controlling it or exerting our will over it, no matter how well intentioned our will may be. Befriending life is more about harmlessness than it is about control.”

— Rachel Naomi Remen

47. “In avoiding all pain and seeking comfort at all cost, we may be left without intimacy or compassion; in rejecting change and risk we often cheat ourselves of the quest; in denying our suffering we may never know our strength or our greatness.”

— Rachel Naomi Remen

48. “To seek approval is to have no resting place, no sanctuary. Like all judgment, approval encourages a constant striving. It makes us uncertain of who we are and of our true value. This.”

— Rachel Naomi Remen

49. “From a good teacher you may learn the secret of listening. You will never learn the secret of life. You will have to listen for yourself.”

— Rachel Naomi Remen

50. “If you carry someone else’s fears and live by someone else’s values, you may find that you have lived their lives.”

— Rachel Naomi Remen