Michael Lerner Quotes

I have long believed that there are fundamentally two forces or emotions that drive our decisions - love and fear. Love has its many manifestations: compassion, gratitude, kindness, and joy. Fear often manifests in cynicism, anger, jealousy, and anxiety. I worry that many of our communities are being driven by fear.

My friends, love is better than anger. Hope is better than fear. Optimism is better than despair. So let us be loving, hopeful and optimistic. And we'll change the world.

We have so much love to give, and the more that we give, the more we receive.

In the weeks after 9/11, out of the pain and the fear there arose also grace and gratitude, eruptions of intense kindness that occurred everywhere, a sharp resolve to just be better, bigger, to shed the nonsense, rise to the occasion.

Love seeketh not itself to please, nor for itself hath any care, but for another gives its ease, and builds a Heaven in Hell's despair.

Haiti is an amazing country. Even though the people there have so little, their attitudes resonate a crazy amount of love and joy. It is truly inspiring to see that. My love for the country starts with them.

A religious man is a person who holds God and man in one thought at one time, at all times, who suffers harm done to others, whose greatest passion is compassion, whose greatest strength is love and defiance of despair.

Love always creates, it never destroys. In this lies man's only promise.

I don't trust or love anyone. Because people are so creepy. Creepy creepy creeps. Creeping around. Creeping here and creeping there. Creeping everywhere.

Take hope from the heart of man and you make him a beast of prey.

The only deadly sin I know is cynicism.

In these times of stress, snark, division and despair, I still suspect that two of the most important features we possess are imagination and a capacity for goodness. Those are qualities for which we will be remembered most fondly.

I believe in the will. I believe in discipline. I believe in the organization. I believe in the rigor that gives us work. I believe in love as an engine of all things. I believe in the light. I believe in God. I believe in kindness.

Hope is like peace. It is not a gift from God. It is a gift only we can give one another.

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love. Where there is injury, pardon. Where there is doubt, faith. Where there is despair, hope. Where there is sadness, joy. O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek To be consoled as to console, To be understood as to understand, To be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive, It is in pardoning that we are pardoned, It is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

God asks us, in trusting Him, to risk everything on a future for which we have not planned, while Satan asks us to give up just one little thing, an unborn child, to keep control over our lives and save everything we have planned for. The devil uses despair, the fear of losing what we have, to make us do things.

Hopepunk works. Try it and I guarantee you will feel better - and so will the people around you. It's positively infectious.

The world is full of negativity and scary news, terrible things happening. And then we have Eurovision, which is like the whole of Europe and the whole world just comes together, and celebrates love and everybody supports everybody.

There are times when I love the world and love everyone, and I want to talk to everyone, and other times when I feel really disillusioned, and like none of this is real, nothing is real around me.

When everything else is looking so grim and the world is changing so fast that it's scary, one thing that remains consistent is kindness.

As we cultivate peace and happiness in ourselves, we also nourish peace and happiness in those we love.

There's something so free about being a fan and being enthusiastic about stuff - you attract all the other people who are also loving and enthusiastic when you're sending out signals of love. When you start to communicate cynicism and hatred, it leads you down a completely different path.

Where refugees seek deliverance that never comesAnd the heart consumes itself as if it would live,Where children age before their timeAnd life wears down the edges of the mind,Where the old man sits with mind grown cold,While bones and sinew, blood and cell, go slowly down to death,Where fear companions each day's life,And Perfect Love seems long delayed.CHRISTMAS IS WAITING TO BE BORN:In you, in me, in all mankind.

Have I mentioned that I expect death around every turn, that every blue sky has a safe sailing out of it, that every bus runs me over, that every low, mean syllable uttered in my direction seems to intimate the violence of murder, that every family seems like an opportunity for ruin and every marriage a ceremony into which calamity will fall and hearts will be broken and lives destroyed and people branded by the mortifications of love?

There's only one of us here: What we give to others, we give to ourselves. What we withhold from others, we withhold from ourselves. In any moment, when we choose fear instead of love, we deny ourselves the experience of Paradise.