Margaret J. Wheatley Quotes

Crisis is the path to happiness. Decay and disintegration do not spell doom, but ascent and beginning. The powerful forces of a new creation operate in the hush beyond the noise of the day.

Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing.

Lives fall apart when they need to be rebuilt.

I always tell people there's nothing greater than a crisis to create a breakthrough. Because that's when we breakthrough usually - most people don't proactively breakthrough - they breakthrough because they have to. And the beauty of crisis is it doesn't feel beautiful, is it melts us down. And when you're melted down you can recast your life in a new way.

Don't be concerned that things appear to be falling apart: this has to happen in order for something new and wonderful to emerge.

When things are bad, it's the best time to reinvent yourself.

You can be shattered, and then you can put yourself back together piece by piece. But what can happen over time is this: You wake up one day and realize that you have put yourself back together completely differently. That you are whole, finally, and strong - but you are now a different shape, a different size.

Your emptiness is but the preparation for your being filled, and your casting down is but the making ready for your lifting up.

May we all emerge from winter with our strength renewed and any unwanted pieces left under the ice.

Only after disaster can we be resurrected. It's only after you've lost everything that you're free to do anything. Nothing is static, everything is evolving, everything is falling apart.

At bottom is the best soil to sow and grow something new again. In that sense, hitting bottom, while extremely painful, is also the sowing ground.

Our molting season, like that of the fouls, must be a crisis in our lives.

When things fall apart in your life, you feel as if your whole world is crumbling. But actually it’s your fixed identity that’s crumbling. And as Chögyam Trungpa used to tell us, that’s cause for celebration.

Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding. Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain.

there is no ascent to the heights without prior descent into darkness, no new life without some form of death.

All human beings have the ability to transform like a caterpillar emerging from its cocoon and taking to the sky.

There's a type of freedom that occurs when everything that you've believed in and worked for is shattered, because then you have the opportunity to rebuild and to put yourself back together in a new way.

If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

What the caterpillar calls the end of the world the master calls a butterfly.

It's taken me a long time to become the person I am, for all the ugliness to fall away. The rotten flesh is gone, and the seed is there. I can touch that now.

I wouldn't change anything because the mistakes and the hurt are as important as all the great fights. They made me who I am today.

There is energy and power in a crisis.

Something good comes out of every crisis.

In a sense, 'Out of Oz' is an examination of how individuals keep going, keep reinventing themselves and their lives, even after life-altering complications have afflicted them.

Life does not accommodate you, it shatters you. It is meant to, and it couldn't do it better. Every seed destroys its container or else there would be no fruition.