Top 60 Stephen Levine Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Let there be peace on earth and let it begin with me. There is nothing to do but be.”

— Stephen Levine

2. “To heal is to touch with love that which we previously touched with fear.”

— Stephen Levine

3. “Non-attachment is not the elimination of desire. It is the spaciousness to allow any quality of mind, any thought or feeling, to arise without closing around it, without eliminating the pure witness of being. It is an active receptivity to life.”

— Stephen Levine

4. “The mind creates the abyss. The heart crosses over it. Love is the bridge.”

— Stephen Levine

5. “Always try to see yourself through God’s eyes.”

— Stephen Levine

6. “Healing is bringing mercy and Awareness into that which we have held in judgment and fear.”

— Stephen Levine

7. “Buddha nature, is like the sun which is always shining, always present, though often obscured. We are blocked from our natural light by the clouds of thought and longing and fear; the overcast of the conditioned mind; the hurricane of I am.”

— Stephen Levine

8. “Loss is the absence of something we were once attached to. Grief is the rope burns left behind, when that which is held is pulled beyond our grasp.”

— Stephen Levine

9. “Safety is the most unsafe spiritual path you can take. Safety keeps you numb and dead. People are caught by surprise when it is time to die. They have allowed themselves to live so little.”

— Stephen Levine

10. “Go to the truth beyond the mind. Love is the bridge.”

— Stephen Levine

11. “Death is just a change in lifestyles.”

— Stephen Levine

12. “Healing comes when we meet our wounded places with compassion.”

— Stephen Levine

13. “When your fear touches someone’s pain, it becomes pity, when your love touches someone’s pain, it become compassion.”

— Stephen Levine

14. “Letting go of our suffering is the hardest work we will ever do. It is also the most fruitful. To heal means to meet ourselves in a new way – in the newness of each moment where all is possible and nothing is limited to the old.”

— Stephen Levine

15. “Our suffering is caused by holding on to how things might have been, should have been, could have been.”

— Stephen Levine

16. “When we see all women as the divine mother and all men as the divine father, everyone you meet is sacred.”

— Stephen Levine

17. “Open yourself to discomfort. Meet it with mercy, not fear. Recognize that when our pain most calls for our embrace, we are often the least present. Soften, enter, and explore, and continue softening to make room for your life.”

— Stephen Levine

18. “When we turn to our innate wisdom for the harmony of mind and gut, we heal the entrance to the heart as it seeks to beat in rhythm with the world.”

— Stephen Levine

19. “Whatever prepares you for death enhances life.”

— Stephen Levine

20. “Nothing is more natural than grief, no emotion more common to our daily experience. It’s an innate response to loss in a world where everything is impermanent.”

— Stephen Levine

21. “People ask what must they become to be loving. The answer is ‘nothing.’ It is a process of letting go of what you thought you had become and allowing your true nature to float to the surface naturally.”

— Stephen Levine

22. “Our work is to keep our hearts open in hell.”

— Stephen Levine

23. “Grief can have a quality of profound healing because we are forced to a depth of feeling that is usually below the threshold of awareness.”

— Stephen Levine

24. “If you can find the God inside yourself, you can find the God inside everybody.”

— Stephen Levine

25. “Oxygen plays a pivotal role in the proper functioning of the immune system. We can look at oxygen deficiency as the single greatest cause of all diseases.”

— Stephen Levine

26. “The only service you can do for anyone is to remind them of their true nature.”

— Stephen Levine

27. “What is it like after you die? Just like it was before you were born.”

— Stephen Levine

28. “Meditation allows us to directly participate in our lives instead of living life as an afterthought.”

— Stephen Levine

29. “Love is not what we become but who we already are.”

— Stephen Levine

30. “If you were going to die soon and had only one phone call to make, who would you call and what would you say? And why are you waiting?”

— Stephen Levine

31. “Buddha left a road map, Jesus left a road map, Krishna left a road map, Rand McNally left a road map. But you still have to travel the road yourself.”

— Stephen Levine

32. “When the heart acknowledges how much pain there is in the mind, it turns like a mother toward a frightened child.”

— Stephen Levine

33. “It is trust in our vast ‘don’t know’ that allows room for the truth, that allows the next intuition to float to the surface.”

— Stephen Levine

34. “It doesn’t matter how long you forget, only how soon you remember!”

— Stephen Levine

35. “The saddest part about being human is not paying attention. Presence is the gift of life.”

— Stephen Levine

36. “In Chinese, the word for heart and mind is the same – Hsin. For when the heart is open and the mind is clear they are of one substance, of one essence.”

— Stephen Levine

37. “Sometimes pain and illness are not meant to be removed. You can’t second-guess God. Rather than praying for it to go away, it’s often wiser to pray that you learn as much from it as you possibly can.”

— Stephen Levine

38. “God is not someone or something separate but is the suchness in each moment, the underlying reality.”

— Stephen Levine

39. “Much thought has at its root a dissatisfaction with what is. Wanting is the urge for the next moment to contain what this moment does not. When there is wanting in the mind, that moment feels incomplete. Wanting is seeing elsewhere. Completeness is being right here.”

— Stephen Levine

40. “You can call it wisdom, or sanity, or health, or enlightenment. I use the word God as a short-cut. I am comfortable with the word God because I don’t have the foggiest idea of what it means.”

— Stephen Levine

41. “Forgiveness is mental floss! Build the capacity to forgive slowly – start with little unkind acts, otherwise you’ll sabotage yourself. When we forgive, we forgive the actor, not the action.”

— Stephen Levine

42. “Acting from the appropriateness of the heart, we are freed from the neediness of the mind.”

— Stephen Levine

43. “Aging teaches us to follow our life force inward. It is an object lesson in how awareness is gradually drawn towards the center...”

— Stephen Levine

44. “There is nothing to do but be.”

— Stephen Levine

45. “Understanding is the ultimate seduction of the mind. Go to the truth beyond the mind.”

— Stephen Levine

46. “If sequestered pain made a sound, the atmosphere would be humming all the time.”

— Stephen Levine

47. “Your distance from your partner is the distance from your heart. The things that make relationships difficult are some of the most precious aspects to us.”

— Stephen Levine

48. “Hell is not fire and brimstone, not a place where you are punished for lying or cheating or stealing. Hell is wanting to be something and somewhere different from where you are.”

— Stephen Levine

49. “The mind is in a constant state of flux. No thought, no feeling, no sensation lasts for more than an instant before it is transformed into the next state, next thought, the next sensation. Note those moments... As they pass through, note such states as confidence, bewilderment, effort, trust, distrust, pleasure, discomfort, boredom, devotion, inquiry, pride, anger, desire, etc.”

— Stephen Levine

50. “What we describe as “our life” is not the sum total of what has passed through our hands but what has passed through our minds. Our life isn’t only a collection of people and places, it is a continuum of the ever-changing feelings they engender. It isn’t only what you’ve touched, it’s what you’ve felt of what you touched.”

— Stephen Levine