Top 90 Rachel Naomi Remen Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Sometimes just being in someone’s presence is strong medicine.”

— Rachel Naomi Remen

52. “It is actually difficult to edit life. Especially in regard to feelings. Not being open to anger or sadness usually means being unable to be open to love and joy. The emotions seem to operate with an all-or-nothing switch.”

— Rachel Naomi Remen

53. “If we fear loss enough, in the end the things we possess will come to possess us.”

— Rachel Naomi Remen

54. “One of the reasons many physicians feel drained by their work is that they do not know how to make an opening to receive anything from their patients. The way we were trained, receiving is considered unprofessional. The way most of us were raised, receiving is considered a weakness.”

— Rachel Naomi Remen

55. “Perhaps winning requires that we love the game unconditionally. Life provides all the pieces. When I accepted certain parts of life and denied and ignored the rest, I could only see my life a piece at a time – the happiness of a success or a time of celebration, or the ugliness and pain of a loss or a failure I was trying hard to put behind me out of sight. But like the dark pieces of the puzzle, these sadder events, painful as they are, have proven themselves a part of something larger.”

— Rachel Naomi Remen

56. “All life has in it the dimension of the Unknown; it is a thing forever unfolding. It seems important to consider the possibility that science may have defined life too small. If we define life too small, we will define ourselves too small as well.”

— Rachel Naomi Remen

57. “Just Listen an excerpt.”

— Rachel Naomi Remen

58. “It has been said that sometimes we need a story more than food in order to live. p 374.”

— Rachel Naomi Remen

59. “Our limitations serve, our wounds serve, even our darkness can serve.”

— Rachel Naomi Remen

60. “We may need to let go of our beliefs and ideas about life in order to have life.”

— Rachel Naomi Remen

61. “We are all born to be a blessing.”

— Rachel Naomi Remen

62. “In our instinctive attachments, our fear of change, and our wish for certainty and permanence, we may undercut the impermanence which is our greatest strength, our most fundamental identity. Without impermanence, there is no process. The nature of life is change. All hope is based on process.”

— Rachel Naomi Remen

63. “Sooner or later we will come to the edge of all that we can control and find life, waiting there for us.”

— Rachel Naomi Remen

64. “When I have forgiven myself and remembered who I am, I will bless everyone and everything I see.” The way to freedom often lies through the open heart.”

— Rachel Naomi Remen

65. “Illiness could be considered a Western form of meditation.”

— Rachel Naomi Remen

66. “As I age I am grateful to find that a silence has begun to gather in me, coexisting with my tempers and my fears, unchanged by my joys or my pain. Sanctuary. Connected to the Silence everywhere.”

— Rachel Naomi Remen

67. “Being alive is being aware, being able to be touched and moved and changed, being able to respond rather than to react, being able to see and hear.”

— Rachel Naomi Remen

68. “People have the natural capacity to affirm and embrace life in the most difficult of circumstances.”

— Rachel Naomi Remen

69. “The choice people have to make is never between slavery and freedom. We will always have to choose between slavery and the unknown.”

— Rachel Naomi Remen

70. “Before every session, I take a moment to remember my humanity. There is no experience that this man has that I cannot share with him, no fear that I cannot understand, no suffering that I cannot care about, because I too am human. No matter how deep his wound, he does not need to be ashamed in front of me. I too am vulnerable. And because of this, I am enough.”

— Rachel Naomi Remen

71. “Big messages come in small packages. All it may take to restore someone’s trust in life may be returning a lost earring or a dropped glove.”

— Rachel Naomi Remen

72. “I have learned that the things that divide us are far less important than those that connect us.”

— Rachel Naomi Remen

73. “When we are seen by the heart we are seen for who we are. We are valued in our uniqueness by those who are able to see us in this way and we become able to know and value ourselves.”

— Rachel Naomi Remen

74. “Wounding and healing are not opposites. They’re part of the same thing. It is our wounds that enable us to be compassionate with the wounds of others. It is our limitations that make us kind to the limitations of other people. It is our loneliness that helps us to to find other people or to even know they’re alone with an illness. I think I have served people perfectly with parts of myself I used to be ashamed of.”

— Rachel Naomi Remen

75. “Perhaps we are no longer a kind people. More and more, we seem to have become numb to the suffering of others and ashamed of our own suffering. Yet suffering is one of the universal conditions of being alive. We all suffer. We have become terribly vulnerable, not because we suffer but because we have separated ourselves from each other.”

— Rachel Naomi Remen

76. “Of course love is never earned. It is a grace we give one another. Anything we need to earn is only approval.”

— Rachel Naomi Remen

77. “I am no longer as inspired by expertise as I once was. Perhaps the worth of any lifetime is measured more in kindness than in competency.”

— Rachel Naomi Remen

78. “The sacred lives beyond labels and judgment, in the wood-of-no-names.”

— Rachel Naomi Remen

79. “Cancer changes your whole life.”

— Rachel Naomi Remen

80. “When we listen, we offer with our attention an opportunity for wholeness.”

— Rachel Naomi Remen

81. “Much of life can never be explained but only witnessed.”

— Rachel Naomi Remen

82. “Is it possible to live so defensively that you never get to live at all?”

— Rachel Naomi Remen

83. “Goose bumps happen when your soul is close to you, breathing lightly on the back of your neck, and wakes you up.”

— Rachel Naomi Remen

84. “Freedom may come not from being in control of life but rather from a willingness to move with the events of life, to hold on to our memories but let go of the past, to choose, when necessary, the inevitable. We can become free at any time.”

— Rachel Naomi Remen

85. “All natural processes are long processes and they last.”

— Rachel Naomi Remen

86. “It is not that we have a soul, but that we are a soul.”

— Rachel Naomi Remen

87. “I think that people get experiences, and out of those experiences come meaning and ideas. It’s like watching a rose bush grow.”

— Rachel Naomi Remen

88. “I think ideas only lead to change for intellectual people; and not even them. What really leads to change is experience. Life itself is the teacher.”

— Rachel Naomi Remen

89. “Everybody is a story.”

— Rachel Naomi Remen

90. “The way in which we go to the grocery store may tell us everything about the way in which we live a life. The way we tend the life force in a plant may be the way we tend our own life force. We are exquisitely coherent.”

— Rachel Naomi Remen

91. “People are waking up in their homes – without conferences. They’re waking up because life is waking them up, not because of some conference called “Body and Soul.””

— Rachel Naomi Remen

92. “I spent the first forty years of my life making major interventions into other people’s lives, and I have an idea of the limitations of that method. I see a major event as rather like major surgery. It is a moment, but whether people use it, whether people go with it, needs to be seen.”

— Rachel Naomi Remen

93. “When people are blessed they discover that their lives matter, that there is something in them worthy of blessing.”

— Rachel Naomi Remen

94. “Most of the things that give life its depth, meaning, and value are impervious to science.”

— Rachel Naomi Remen

95. “My sense is that you can never teach anybody anything, or change anybody in ways that they don’t already have in mind.”

— Rachel Naomi Remen

96. “The best stories have many meanings; their meaning changes as our capacity to understand and appreciate meaning grows.”

— Rachel Naomi Remen

97. “Wholeness is never lost, it is only forgotten. Integrity rarely means that we need to add something to ourselves: it is more an undoing than a doing, a freeing ourselves from beliefs we have about who we are and ways we have been persuaded to ‘fix’ ourselves to know who we genuinely are.”

— Rachel Naomi Remen