W. Somerset Maugham Quotes

You don't go through a deep personal transformation without some kind of dark night of the soul.

I've had the longest mid-life crisis ever.

People say, When you have children, everything changes. But maybe things are awakened that were already there.

A lot of people that embark on spiritual endeavors tended to, especially in the '60s and '70s, they tended to give up what they had before and cut themselves off from their lives, previous life as it were. But, I don't think that one should do that.

What I am very, very moved and struck by is that so many people in the world are often living a life that they hadn't planned for themselves. And they wake up one day and say, 'Hang on. Who am I? Is this really me? Is this what I really wanted?' And also, 'Can I change it? Have I got the courage to change it?'

I was having a really-early-onset midlife crisis, and then something clicked in an improv class, and I knew.

Twenty-eight to 31 is the tough period. You have to be really careful because it's so cataclysmic, so life-altering. People do really dramatic things like get married, or they'll get divorced. Your chances of committing suicide go way up. It's basically psychic death. You see the signs of it around 27, and you're still on the out-end of it around 31. Everyone I've talked to who's gone through that and come out the other side walks out of it like, "MY LIFE IS GREAT".

I've met a few people who had to change their jobs in order to change their lives, but I've met many more people who merely had to change their motive to service in order to change their lives.

Your life will be transformed when you make peace with your shadow.

In the search for our best selves, several questions will guide our thinking: Am I what I want to be? Am I closer to the Savior today than I was yesterday? Will I be closer yet tomorrow? Do I have the courage to change for the better?

How sickness enlarges the dimension of a man’s self to himself!

Sometimes when we awaken from the bad dream of disowning ourselves, we think that the sojourn to self-discovery is a new one. But it is an ancient quest.

It changes your life, the pursuit of truth.

There comes a time when the bubble of ego is popped and you can’t get the ground back for an extended period of time. Those times, when you absolutely cannot get it back together, are the most rich and powerful times in our lives.

Emotional turmoil can be a powerful catalyst to reconnect us with our divine nature. It propels us into a journey of self discovery and urges us to learn how to love and accept our entire being.

The fearsome blessing of that hard time continues to work itself out in my life in the same way we're told the universe is still hurtling through outer space under the impact of the great cosmic explosion.... I think grace sometimes explodes into our lives like that-sending our pain, terror, astonishment hurtling through inner space until by grace they become Orion, Cassiopeia, Polaris to give us our bearings, to bring us into something like full being at last.

Everything you have in your life, you have attracted to yourself because of the way you think, because of the person that you are. You can change your life because you can change the way you think.

Change your thinking, and you will change your life.

Am I the woman I think I am, the woman I want to be? More importantly, am I the woman the Savior needs me to be?

That is perhaps what we seek throughout life, that and nothing more, the greatest possible sorrow so as to become fully ourselves before dying.

A book should be an axe to chop open the frozen sea inside us.

Despite all the doom and gloom that constantly assaults our senses, there is a way for us to ransom our lives and reclaim our futures: it consists in turning away from the world to recognize what in life makes us truly happy. For each of us, what that is will be different. But once we obtain this inner knowledge, we will possess the ability to transform our outer world. "You can live a lifetime and, at the end of it, know more about other people than you know about yourself," the pilot and writer Beryl Markham reminds us. We cannot let this continue to occur.

I think I try to speak to the heart of the woman who I know is interested in growing into herself.

Something had changed in me, even if I didn't know what it was just yet. All I could think was that I felt alive for the first time.

I had realized in the meantime that action too has its difficulties, and that one can also be led to it by neurosis. We are not saved by politics any more than by literature.