Top 70 Sam Keen Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “We come to love not by finding a perfect person, but by learning to see an imperfect person perfectly.”

— Sam Keen

2. “What shapes our lives are the questions we ask, refuse to ask, or never think to ask.”

— Sam Keen

3. “We learn to fly not by being fearless, but by the daily practice of courage.”

— Sam Keen

4. “Soul grows in communion. Word by word, story by story, for better or worse, we build our world. From true conversation – speaking and listening – communication deepens into compassion and creates community.”

— Sam Keen

5. “Each day befriend a single fear, and the miscellaneous terrors of being human will never join together to form such a morass of vague anxiety that it rules your life from the shadows of the unconscious. We learn to fly not by being fearless, but by the daily practice of courage.”

— Sam Keen

6. “To love is to return to a home we never left, to remember who we are.”

— Sam Keen

7. “Burnout is nature’s way of telling you, you’ve been going through the motions your soul has departed; you’re a zombie, a member of the walking dead, a sleepwalker. False optimism is like administrating stimulants to an exhausted nervous system.”

— Sam Keen

8. “To be on a quest is nothing more or less than to become an asker of questions.”

— Sam Keen

9. “The ‘still, small voice’ of God never calls on me to be like another man. It appeals to me to rise to my full stature and fulfill the promise that sleeps within my being.”

— Sam Keen

10. “The telling of your stories is a revolutionary act.”

— Sam Keen

11. “Paranoia reduces anxiety and guilt by transferring to the other all the characteristics one does not want to recognize in oneself. It is maintained by selective perception and recall. We only see and acknowledge those negative aspects of the enemy that support the stereotype we have already created.”

— Sam Keen

12. “Love isn’t finding a perfect person. It’s seeing an imperfect person perfectly.”

— Sam Keen

13. “You don’t go through a deep personal transformation without some kind of dark night of the soul.”

— Sam Keen

14. “I think it’s increasingly hard to have deep self-knowledge without entering the darkness in some way.”

— Sam Keen

15. “Compassion begins with the acknowledgment of the single inescapable truth that is the foundation for the possibility of love between human beings – an awareness of the tragic sense of life.”

— Sam Keen

16. “In the beginning, we create the enemy. Before the weapon comes the image. We think others to death and then invent the battle-axe or ballistic missiles with which to actually kill them. Propaganda precedes technology.”

— Sam Keen

17. “The best practice is to follow the advice posted on every railroad crossing: Stop. Look. Listen.”

— Sam Keen

18. “The sense of gratitude produces true spiritual alchemy, makes us magnanimous – large souled.”

— Sam Keen

19. “Trust what moves you most deeply.”

— Sam Keen

20. “There are two questions a man must ask himself: The first is ‘Where am I going?’ and the second is ‘Who will go with me?’ If you ever get these questions in the wrong order you are in trouble.”

— Sam Keen

21. “Enter each day with the expectation that the happenings of the day may contain a clandestine message addressed to you personally. Expect omens, epiphanies, casual blessings and teachers who unknowingly speak to your condition.”

— Sam Keen

22. “It’s interesting that the worse things get, the more we believe the next technological fix is going to get us out of it. But it’s like being in quicksand: the more you struggle the deeper you sink.”

— Sam Keen

23. “The first part of the spiritual journey should properly be called psychological rather than spiritual because it involves peeling away the myths and illusions that have misinformed us.”

— Sam Keen

24. “We now realize that we’re not living in a piecemeal world, but a world where everything is linked together.”

— Sam Keen

25. “Freedom is an inside job.”

— Sam Keen

26. “In the degree that we remember and retell our stories and create new ones we become the authors, the authorities, of our own lives.”

— Sam Keen

27. “When you genuinely lose your illusions, you begin to marvel at things, because you don’t have the answers any more.”

— Sam Keen

28. “The abyss beyond our beliefs is something we have to pass through in order to see the world anew, to see it in terms not dictated so much by our culture, our parents, or our religious convictions.”

— Sam Keen

29. “I’ve spent my life cultivating knowledge of myself. But the more I know myself, the more utterly mysterious I become.”

— Sam Keen

30. “Myth is the system of basic metaphors, images, and stories that informs the perceptions, memories, and aspirations of a people; provides the rationale for its institutions, rituals and power structure; and gives a map of the purpose and stages of life.”

— Sam Keen

31. “The world is run largely by urban, sedentary males. The symbol of power is the chair.”

— Sam Keen

32. “I think that critiquing the myths of our society and helping people find their way through them is a very important thing. It’s a theme that goes through all of my work.”

— Sam Keen

33. “You can know what’s in your life when you know what’s in your heart.”

— Sam Keen

34. “Every time I come across a rattlesnake on my farm I initially react in fear and am tempted to kill it. Then I realize I wouldn’t want to live in a world where all wild things – without and within – are domesticated.”

— Sam Keen

35. “The deepest mystery comes not when we don’t know somebody well, but when we do.”

— Sam Keen

36. “Our minds, bodies, feelings, relationships are all informed by our questions. What you ask is who you are. What you find depends on what you search for. And what shapes our lives are the questions we ask, refuse to ask, or never think of asking.”

— Sam Keen

37. “There is a saying in Bali: “We have no art. We do everything as beautifully as possible.” This reflects my philosophy of practice. I try to remember daily what a gift it is to have the privilege of living in this wondrous world.”

— Sam Keen

38. “The more you become a connoisseur of gratitude, the less you are a victim of resentment, depression, and despair.”

— Sam Keen

39. “The root of humanly caused evil is not man’s animal nature, not territorial aggression, or innate selfishness, but our need to gain self-esteem, deny our mortality, and achieve a heroic self-image. Our desire for the best is the cause of the worst.”

— Sam Keen

40. “We suffer from the illusion that the faster we run, the more likely we are to grasp happiness. The truth is that the velocity necessary for success rarely exceeds the rate of reflection.”

— Sam Keen

41. “I think we have to trust ourselves in the darkness of not knowing. The God out of which we came and into which we go is an unknown God. It’s the luminosity of that darkness and that unknowing that is, I think, the most human – and the most sacred – place of all.”

— Sam Keen

42. “Throughout my life, I’ve had different metaphors for freedom. At one time, it was skin diving. In the ocean you feel weightless; you escape from gravity.”

— Sam Keen

43. “The spiritual mind is always metaphorical. Spiritual thinking is poetic thinking. It’s always trying to put a very diaphanous experience into words, realizing all the while that words are inadequate.”

— Sam Keen

44. “You come to love not by discovering the ideal individual, yet by figuring out how to see a blemished individual flawlessly.”

— Sam Keen

45. “I think we’re always in the process of writing and rewriting the story of our lives, forming our experiences into a narrative that makes sense. Much of that work involves demythologizing family myths and cultural myths – getting free of what we have been told about ourselves.”

— Sam Keen

46. “If we don’t preserve forest habitat for spotted owls, then soon we won’t have trees to refresh the air we breathe. And we’re realizing that this applies to social ecology, as well.”

— Sam Keen

47. “There is the extreme of hopelessness and the inevitability of doom, a deep despair that comes from the sense that our industrial, consuming society is jeopardizing the planet.”

— Sam Keen

48. “Human beings are what I think of as “biomythic” animals: we’re controlled largely by the stories we tell. When we get the story wrong, we get out of harmony with the rest of the natural order.”

— Sam Keen

49. “A society in which vocation and job are separated for most people gradually creates an economy that is often devoid of spirit, one that frequently fills our pocketbooks at the cost of emptying our souls.”

— Sam Keen

50. “I think there are families that are very kind and supportive of people’s ability to change. People who come from such families may go through life without dipping into the dark night.”

— Sam Keen