Stephen Levine Quotes

Did you ever reach a point in your life, where you say to yourself, 'This is the best I'm ever going to look, the best I'm ever going to feel, the best I'm ever going to do,' and it ain't that great?

If I don't feel right about what I'm in, I don't feel right about anything.

I wasn't unhappy, but I was a little like: 'Is this it? Really?' I was thirsty.

My life has no purpose, no direction, no aim, no meaning, and yet I'm happy. I can't figure it out. What am I doing right?

Who you are vs. who you wish you were: Who wins?

I have my moments. Ever since I was a boy, I never was someone who was at ease with happiness. Too often I embrace introspection and self-doubt. I wish I could embrace the good things.

I love playing ego and insecurity combined.

Even people who believe they deserve to be happy and have nice things often don't feel worthy once they have them.

The man who is dissatisfied with himself, what can he do?

I don't know how happy I was when I met Sting. I always had this difficulty of not really knowing who I was.

Sure, I’m dramatic and sloppily semi-cynical and semi-sentimental. But, in leisure years I could grow and choose my way. Now I am living on the edge. We all are on the brink, and it takes a lot of nerve, a lot of energy, to teeter on the edge, looking over, looking down into the windy blackness and not being quite able to make out, through the yellow, stinking mist, just what lies below in the slime, in the oozing, vomit-streaked slime; and so I could go on, my thoughts, writing much, trying to find the core, the meaning for myself.

Perhaps I'm hiding from myself. Perhaps I don't want to be what I'm supposed to be. Or perhaps I don't want to keep living the life I already started to live.

Obstinate are the trammels, but my heart aches when I try to break them. Freedom is all I want, but to hope for it I feel ashamed. I am certain that priceless wealth is in thee, and that thou art my best friend, but I have not the heart to sweep away the tinsel that fills my room. The shroud that covers me is a shroud of dust and death; I hate it, yet hug it in love. My debts are large, my failures great, my shame secret and heavy; yet when I come to ask for my good, I quake in fear lest my prayer be granted.

Standing alone,eager to just believe,it's good enough to be what you really are,but in your heart,uncertainty forever lies,and you'll always be,somewhere on the outside.

When I turn the lights out, when I close my eyes, reality overcomes me, I'm living a lie.

The person you are most afraid to contradict is yourself.

But the worst enemy you can meet will always be yourself; you lie in wait for yourself in caverns and forests. Lonely one, you are going the way to yourself! And your way goes past yourself, and past your seven devils! You will be a heretic to yourself and witch and soothsayer and fool and doubter and unholy one and villain. You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame: how could you become new, if you had not first become ashes?

Now, more than ever, I realize just how illusory my undeserved success has been. I still hold out some hope of doing better, but age and unhappiness have sapped my strength.

Can a man possessing conciousness ever really respect himself?

I don't like where I'm going and I don't like where I've been. Why am I in a hurry?

There was once a man, Harry, called the steppenwolf. He went on two legs, wore clothes and was a human being, but nevertheless he was in reality a wolf of the steppes. He had learned a good deal of all that people of a good intelligence can, and was a fairly clever fellow. What he had not learned, however, was this: to find contentment in himself and his own life.

I'm tired of my life, my clothes, the things I say. I'm hacking away at the surface, as at some kind of gray ice, trying to break through to what is underneath or I am dead. I can feel the surface trembling—it seems ready to give but it never does. I am uninterested in current events. How can I justify this? How can I explain it? I don't want to have the same vocabulary I've always had. I want something richer, broader, more penetrating and powerful.

For a long time now, every meeting with another human being has been the reverberations after even the simplest conversation. But the deep collision is and has been with my unregenerate, tormenting and tormented self...I am unable to become what I see. I feel like an inadequate machine, a machine that breaks down at crucial moments, grinds to a dreadful halt, "won't go".

Early in my career I was divided because I had the real self underneath: the lawbreaker, the anarchist, the person who swims against the tide, the outsider, the loner, all of that guy. He was my private self, and I had this other side that wanted to be liked in order to do all those things I dreamed of as a little boy. I didn't realize that those things didn't go together until later. And I'm quite sure that my use of acid and peyote helped me accept what was really going on inside of me instead of what I had imposed on myself.

That mercy towards one set of creatures was cruelty towards another sickened his sense of harmony. As you got older, and felt yourself to be at the center of your time, and not at a point in its circumference, as you had felt when you were little, you were seized with a sort of shuddering, he perceived. All around you there seemed to be something glaring, garish, rattling, and the noises and glares hit upon the little cell called your life, and shook it, and warped it.