Brennan Manning Quotes

I'm most connected to myself when I'm alone in a room, moving my hand across a page. That's when I feel most like me.

With 'Girls,' I have been able to plug into almost everything I've felt that's personal and sensitive.

Love After Love all your life, whom you have ignored for another, who knows you by heart. Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, the photographs, the desperate notes, peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life.

Solitude does not necessarily mean living apart from others; rather, it means never living apart from one's self. It is not about the absence of other people -- it is about being fully present to ourselves, whether or not we are with others. Community does not necessarily mean living face-to-face with others; rather, it means never losing the awareness that we are connected to each other. It is not about the presence of other people -- it is about being fully open to the reality of relationship, whether or not we are alone.

To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others.

Blessed are those who do not fear solitude, who are not afraid of their own company, who are not always desperately looking for something to do, something to amuse themselves with, something to judge.

Looking back in front of me, in the mirror a grin. Through eyes of love I see, I'm only looking at a friend.

I don't want to be anything other than what I've been trying to be lately. All I have to do is think of me and I have peace of mind. I'm tired of looking 'round rooms wondering what I've got to do or who I'm supposed to be. I don't want to be anything other than me.

Know yourself, like yourself, be yourself.

The sacredness, if there is any, is all in yourself and not in the place.

There is nothing as certain as silence, stillness, and solitude to introduce you to the secrets of yourself.

If you can tell the world who you are and what you believe without breaking stride or hesitating, you are happy with yourself.

At the end of the day, don't forget that you're a person.

I am me and I am okay.

When you are with everyone but me, you're with no one. When you are with no one but me, you're with everyone. Instead of being so bound up with everyone, be everyone. When you become that many, you're nothing. Empty.

When you look back... on your love affairs... what you really find out is that the only person you really go to bed with is yourself.

religion, like beauty, cannot be experienced in cold blood.

It may be laid down as a position which seldom deceives, that when a man cannot bear his own company, there is something wrong.

Solitude is my element, and the reason is that extreme awareness of other people... precludes awareness of one's self so that after a while the self no longer knows that it exists.

But I don't regret anything that I've gone through, because it makes me who I am.

What is needed is, in the end, simply this: solitude, great inner solitude.

Lovers are not snails; they don't have to protrude from their shells and meet each other halfway. Meet me within your own self.

Just keep coming home to yourself, you are the one who you've been waiting for.

The time will come when, with elation, you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror, and each will smile at the other’s welcome.