Marianne Williamson Quotes

I am somewhat grateful to the disintegration of my marriage for teaching me a lot about myself and about relationships, and though I wish it hadn't been such a taxing lesson, I wouldn't change a thing.

A relationship is more of an assignment than a choice. We can walk away from the assignment, but we cannot walk away from the lessons it presents. We stay with a relationship until a lesson is learned, or we simply learn it another way.

Remember that no relationship is a total waste of time. You can always learn something about yourself.

The thing is, relationships never work out... until they do. You learn a lot from relationships that don't work out.

Just going through a marriage and a divorce - which I essentially did by 21 - will give you an insane amount of perspective on life.

Getting married and divorced really is a learning experience.

Every woman I have ever loved has left her print upon me, where I loved some invaluable piece of myself apart from me-so different that I had to stretch and grow in order to recognize her. And in that growing, we came to separation, that place where work begins.

Embrace every challenge you have, every person you meet, every place you visit, every task you succeed at, and especially those at which you fail. You will learn from them all. You'll learn about the world at large and about other people but most important, you'll learn about yourself.

Now you see how you are, the wisdom mixed in with all the scars.

It's hard enough to change ourselves. We can't expect other people to change so that we feel better. We have to take the journey ourselves.

You could never teach other people anything that mattered. The important things they had to learn for themselves, almost always by making mistakes, so that the lessons arrived too late to help. Experience was in that sense useless. It was precisely what could not be passed along in a lesson.

Is a little experience too much to pay for learning to know oneself?

I found I was having continually to please the sort of people I'd always hated when I was a child. This began to bring me back to reality.

The boy told himself that, on the way toward realizing his own destiny, he had learned all he needed to know, and had experienced everything he might have dreamed of.

In my experience, it is Affection that creates this taste, teaching us first to notice, then to endure, then to smile at, then to enjoy, and finally to appreciate the people who 'happen to be there.' Made for us? Thank God, no. They are themselves, odder than you could have believed and worth far more than we guessed.

I've learnt a lot about certain things but you also learn through your own experience.

I'm thankful for some of bad experiences I've had. They helped me with the way I view people and see them for who they really are.

At a certain age you start becoming brave enough to reveal yourself and it's the revealing of who you are that enables you to dig deeper into different characters. You'll get to a point where you can say: 'I can relate to that', 'I know that', 'I don't have to make that up' and that resonates with people in the audience who can tell that you've been there.

There is something fantastic about getting divorced. Everyone should do it to experience the extraordinary sense of freedom after being in marriage jail.

We will always be attracted to the situation or person that we need, in any given moment, in order to learn whatever lesson that we need to learn. The most important thing is to learn the lesson quickly, let go, and then move on.

I want to know why this is such a part of me. I want to know why this thing that happened to other people has happened so much to me. I keep looking for the lesson.

I would have to say that my divorce was an incredibly difficult experience in my life, but I am truly thankful for it. It made me a stronger and better person.

If someone who wanted to learn to dance were to say: For centuries, one generation after the other has learned the positions, and it is high time that I take advantage of this and promptly begin with the quadrille--people would presumably laugh a little at him, but in the world of spirit this is very plausible. What, then, is education? I believed it is the course the individual goes through in order to catch up with himself, and the person who will not go through this course is not much helped by being born in the most enlightened age.

Traveling makes men wiser, but less happy.