Jane Hirshfield Quotes

Keeping a diary is like closing your bedroom door and refusing to come out until dinnertime: it is a declaration of self.

But I believe above all that I wanted to build the palace of my memory, because my memory is my only homeland.

You can understand a lot about yourself by working out which fairytale you use to present your world to yourself in.

My favorite books are psychology, self-help, and I'm fascinated by Jung, by dream work.

What matters is what happens in the soul of an artist when you're playing.

One does not read a poem by Gwendolyn Brooks with hopes that it will grant him a career in engineering; he does so because poetry helps him see something in the world that he might not have seen before.

When I'm on my own with my camera, taking these pictures, it feels as if I am in a room of my own, a self-contained world.

We knew so little about eachother. We lay mostly submerged, like ice floes with our visible social selves projecting only cool and white. Here was a rare sight below the waves, of a man's privacy and turmoil, of his dignity upended by the overpowering necessity of pure fantasy, pure thought, by the irreducible human element - Mind.

Mind is a door that leads you outside in the world; meditation is the door that leads you to your interiority - to the very innermost shrine of your being.

I have lived on the lip of insanity, wanting to know reasons, knocking on a door. It opens. I've been knocking from the inside.

That which is nearest is least observed. The Atman is the nearest of the near, therefore the careless and the unsteady mind gets no clue to it. But the person who is alert, calm, self-restrained, and discriminating ignores the external world and, diving more and more into the inner world, realizes the glory of the Atman and becomes great.

In order really to write one has to sink deep into the self and become lost there.

Most people just want to be part of the world, they want to live, love, and enjoy themselves - to take part in the world around them. Whereas artists are always retreating, locking the door, and inventing other worlds.

The imagination is not an escape, but a return to the richness of our true selves; a return to reality.

But man as a person, the same man, gains mastery over egocentric self-confinement by disclosing a universe in himself...Personality is a universe, it is filled with universal content.

The doors to the world of the wild Self are few but precious. If you have a deep scar, that is a door, if you have an old, old story, that is a door. If you love the sky and the water so much you almost cannot bear it, that is a door. If you yearn for a deeper life, a full life, a sane life, that is a door.

There is a great deal of unmapped country within us.

My mandalas were cryptograms concerning the state of the self which was presented to me anew each day...I guarded them like precious pearls....It became increasingly plain to me that the mandala is the center. It is the exponent of all paths. It is the path to the center, to individuation.

People who mattered could not take the humdrum world. But this was not the world, it was enchantment; and all of it was mine.

Think... of the world you carry within you, and call this thinking whatever you want to: a remembering of your own childhood or a yearning toward a future of your own - only be attentive to what is arising within you, and place that above everything you perceive around you. What is happening in your innermost self is worthy of your entire love; somehow you must find a way to work at it.

Following your bliss is not self-indulgent, but vital; your whole physical system knows that this is the way to be alive in this world and the way to give to the world the very best that you have to offer. There IS a track just waiting for each of us and once on it, doors will open that were not open before and would not open for anyone else.

It is not necessarily at home that we best encounter our true selves. The furniture insists that we cannot change because it does not; the domestic setting keeps us tethered to the person we are in ordinary life, who may not be who we essentially are.

In 2007, Stanford Business School Advisory committee asserted that self awareness was the most important attribute a leader should develop. The challenge for the modern entrepreneur is to take that path.

Get away from all books and forms and let your soul see its Self. "We are deluded and maddened by books", Shri Krishna declares.

The Perennial Philosophy is expressed most succinctly in the Sanskrit formula, tat tvam asi ('That art thou'); the Atman, or immanent eternal Self, is one with Brahman, the Absolute Principle of all existence; and the last end of every human being, is to discover the fact for himself, to find out who he really is.