Richard Foster Quotes

Much of the time, we're transfixed by all of the ways we can reflect ourselves into the world. And we can barely find the time to reflect deeply back in on our own selves.

I feel like I'm still at a point where I have a lot to learn from watching myself, so I find that it helps. But it's always weird.

If you are never alone you cannot know yourself. And if you do not know yourself, you will begin to fear the void.

I myself have noticed my growing resemblance to a daffodil.

I invite people to examine their lives without negativity, knowing that it's scary, but that not doing it is even scarier.

Our society is all about focusing on the externals, "These people like me, I'm successful because of these people, they view me as being good" and we need to take that vision and instead of expanding it outwards we need to look inside ourselves.

I have a great deal of experience in justifying myself to myself.

People don't acknowledge loneliness in themselves, and don't appreciate its benefits, the reflection and attentiveness that come with it, the deepened acquaintance with oneself.

People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls.

The best change you can make is to hold up a mirror so that people can look into it and change themselves. That's the only way a person can be changed." By looking into yourself," Zia said. "Even if you have to look into a mirror that's outside yourself to do it." "And you know," Maida added. "That mirror can be a story you hear, or just someone else's eyes. Anything that reflects back so you can see yourself in it.

...the most serious thing, and the strangest, is that we are afraid to the point of panic, not so much of seeing ourselves as of being seen by ourselves. This is our root absurdity. What is behind this great fear?

If you find yourself running away from something and then suddenly you're isolated in a vacuum, then you have to deal with all the inherent truths and learning things about yourself and the people that are around you.

Many of us are frightened to look within ourselves, and fear has us put up walls so thick we no longer remember who we really are.

If human nature does alter it will be because individuals manage to look at themselves in a new way. Here and there people - a very few people, but a few novelists are among them - are trying to do this. Every institution and vested interest in against such a search: organized religion, the state, the family in its economic aspect, have nothing to gain, and it is only when outward prohibitions weaken that it can proceed: history conditions it to that extent.

Many times we ask people to march outwardly, when we haven't yet spent the needed time inwardly.

It seems like people are all the time making themselves themselves, but they don't really know it. You can only have true vision when you look behind. A person can slide so fast into being something they never really intended. I wonder if you can truly resurrect your own self.

It is rare for people to be asked the question which puts them squarely in front of themselves

For most people, self-awareness and self-pity blossom simultaneously in early adolescence. It's about that time that we start viewing the world as something other than a whoop-de-doo playground, we start to experience personally how threatening it can be, how cruel and unjust. At the very moment when we become, for the first time, both introspective and socially conscientious, we receive the bad news that the world, by and large, doesn't give a rat's ass.

I want to be able to challenge myself. And do things that are away from what I usually do. Stand-up is safe for me. I can do stand-up in front of twenty-five thousand people, and I'm like, "I know how to do this. This is what I do." I want to be a little scared.

I’m not very creative” doesn’t work. There’s no such thing as creative people and non-creative people. There are only people who use their creativity and people who don’t. Unused creativity doesn’t just disappear. It lives within us until it’s expressed, neglected to death, or suffocated by resentment and fear.

We only really face up to ourselves when we are afraid.

I think people can benefit tremendously from really asking why they're doing certain things.

So you have to be your own teacher and your own disciple, and there is no teacher outside, no saviour, no master; you yourself have to change, and therefore you have to learn to observe, to know yourself. This learning about yourself is a fascinating and joyous business.

Why do people not confess vices? It is because they have not yet laid them aside. It is a waking person only who can tell their dreams.

If you want oneness in society, you have to teach people to go inside instead of going outside, because if they want peace, they need to find it within.