Cat Stevens Quotes

I am imprisoned with a perception that will settle for nothing less than making a revolution in the consciousness of our time.

It felt like I'd been living underground, and for a moment, I'd been given this glimpse of the sky. Once you've seen that, how can you go back where you came from?

Once your awareness becomes a flame, it burns up the whole slavery that the mind has created.

History, the winnowing wind, never halts. We see the chaff rise, forget the waiting grain, seed of the future, fallen to the threshing floor. We never learn, but live on, slit-narrow, as if our living were a pencil line traced upon paper, behaving as trapped denizens of a flat world hemmed in by the bigoted horizon of our own making. Yet the meaning of living is a pushing back, a pulling down of the great walls and domes of fear and ignorance, is relinquishing the nest for the sky, ignorance for understanding. The look back is also a look forward.

It was the night things changed, can you see it now? These walls that they put up to hold us back fell down It's a revolution, throw your hands up, 'cause we never gave in

You don't have to stay where you are; you can make a change.

All girls know that they can be anything now. That transformation is to me one of the most satisfying things.

It took me a long, long time to break the chains that's inside me.

Time is the father of truth, its mother is our mind.

Time has been transformed, and we have changed; it has advanced and set us in motion; it has unveiled its face, inspiring us with bewilderment and exhilaration.

Don't spend time beating on a wall, hoping to transform it into a door.

So the bodhisattva saves all beings, not by preaching sermons to them, but by showing them that they are delivered, they are liberated, by the act of not being able to stop changing.

There is no slavery but ignorance. Liberty is the child of intelligence.

The social revolution of the nineteenth century can not draw its poetry from the past, it can draw that only from the future. It cannot start upon its work before it has stricken off all superstition concerning the past

The first step in freeing men from external chains was to emancipate them from the internal chains of false beliefs and ideals.

The revelation of thought takes men out of servitude into freedom.

I think that what's bizarre to me about life is that sometimes you have to have everything taken away before you experience grace or before you actually recognize that grace can happen to you.

You know the day destroys the night, Night divides the day, Tried to run, Tried to hide, Break on through to the other side...

His life has been like a ballpark, hasn't it? All lines, structure, and rules, never changing. But now he's been hit over the wall into unknown territory.

History may be servitude. History may be freedom. See, now they vanish. The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them, to become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.

Every mind deserves to be free. When the mind is free, that's the end of suffering.

The Ripe FigNow that You live here in my chest,anywhere we sit is a mountaintop.And those other images,which have enchanted peoplelike porcelain dolls from China,which have made men and women weepfor centuries, even those have changed now.What used to be pain is a lovely benchwhere we can rest under the roses.A left hand has become a right.A dark wall, a window.A cushion in a shoe heel,the leader of the community!Now silence. What we sayis poison to someand nourishing to others.What we say is a ripe fig,but not every bird that flieseats figs.

Remember: whatsoever I am saying is not the thing that I want to say to you. Whatsoever I am saying has nothing to do with truth, because truth cannot be said. Whatsoever I am saying is nothing but a hammering. If you become awake, you will see the truth.

A certain kind of permission is given to live differently, to conceptualize and to act according to a new conceptualization.

The walls of rude minds are scrawled all over with facts, with thoughts. They shall one day bring a lantern and read the inscriptions.