Richard Rohr Quotes

The person you call an enemy is an exaggerated aspect of your own shadow self.

Rejection is a form of self-assertion. You have only to look back upon yourself as a person who hates this or that to discover what it is that you secretly love.

Guilt [is] a tool, rather than a weapon against the self.

I think over time you learn to know a bit more about yourself - you develop a certain amount of self-insight and self-awareness, and you know what you can absorb, and what you cannot; what gets to you and what doesn't.

Over time you learn to know a bit more about yourself - you develop a certain amount of self-insight and self-awareness, and you know what you can absorb, and what you cannot; what gets to you and what doesn't. And I observe a lot. I see a lot around me. And over time you also get to understand the nature of man and the environments you are dealing with, and you can't always allow emotions and temper to flare up because you're displeased with something, or you want to change it.

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

I used to have a real problem with self-pity. Every time the devil would throw a pity party, I would attend.

Resistance to revelation, resistance to becoming conscious of all that dwells within us - high and low, light and dark - is the anti-change factor. It is also the mainspring of all our psychological fears.

There are parts of me that I keep secret even from myself. I have demons and I'd love to be able to healthily look at the demons and still be a wonderful actor and not feel I need them to create.

I wanted to share the experience of how yoga and meditation have transformed my life, how they have enabled me to observe who I am, first in my body, and then emotionally, and on to a kind of spiritual path.

'Konnichiwa' was made because I don't like the industry. I really had to remove myself from it to understand myself.

The moment I started watching my thoughts, I realized how futile fear is.

Emotion is a broad spectrum and I just been to a lot of sides of my own emotions.

I have a mean streak and I am capable of cruelty. This does not mean that I am necessarily mean and cruel; instead, it means that I have to be vigilant about my capacity for cruelty and the mean bone in my body.

I have a clear view of 12 years of history of my inner self. First the cramped self, that self with big blinkers, then the disappearance of the blinkers and the self, now gradually the reemergence of a self without blinkers.

There are moments when the inner life actually 'pays,' when years of self-scrutiny, conducted for no ulterior motive, are suddenly of practical use.

The self-explorer, whether he wants to or not, becomes the explorer of everything else.

Self-knowledge is an anchor that makes unpredictability tolerable.

the process of building a self and its works is always too slow. One is always in arrears to oneself.

Doubt, not self-reflection, comes from a destructive energy, and when it rears its head, I talk to it like a lunatic.

I think that there is a tragic misfit at the core of me, and I've just done a lot of work on myself. I love a good self-help book; I've read a ton of them. I love self-help seminars and therapy and all that. I think that probably, at my core, if I had done no work on myself, I would probably be Laura from The Mysteries Of Laura, but I worked hard to be a more stable person because that's what I wanted out of my life.

If thou has not seen the devil, look at thine own self.

Righteousness cannot be born until self-righteousness is dead.

To confront a person with their own shadow is to show them their own light.