Meridel Le Sueur Quotes

I was trying to change things on the outside and you can't. You've got to feel it on the inside and everything else will change.

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

I never come back home with the same moral character I went out with; something or other becomes unsettled where I had achieved internal peace; some one or other of the things I had put to flight reappears on the scene.

Adolescence represents an inner emotional upheaval, a struggle between the eternal human wish to cling to the past and the equally powerful wish to get on with the future.

You cannot see the changes that you're dreaming about, because they're internal.

If you will change everything will change for you. Don’t wait for things to change. Change doesn’t start out there, change starts within....All change starts with you.

I will sleep no more but arise, You oceans that have been calm within me! how I feel you, fathomless, stirring, preparing unprecedented waves and storms.

I feel some part of me can wake up and be very existential and the next day wake up and be sort of in love with the universe.

In other words, it was a struggle with himself. And the product of that struggle: anger, bitterness, resentment, envy or transformation, aspiration, hope, decency..the product of that struggle is the quality of your life and the nature of your soul.

My own journey started long before I left, and was over before I returned.

I've known both misery and happiness, lived in so many different skins it is impossible for one skin to claim me. And I have felt like a wayfarer on an alien planet at times - walking, running, wondering about what brought me to this particular place, and why. But once I was here the dreams started moving in, and I went about devouring them as they devoured me.

Many people need a new rewiring of their heart and mind.

It is the measure of my individual struggle from darkness toward some measure of light.

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.

Authentic spirituality... does not render the self content, it renders it undone.

Self-knowledge is not the knowledge of a dead self, self-knowledge is the knowledge of the process of the self. It is an alive phenomenon. The self is not a thing, it is an event, it is a process. Never think in terms of things, the self is not there inside you just like a thing waiting in your room. The self is a process: changing, moving, arriving at new altitudes, moving into new planes, going deeper into new depths. Each moment much work is going on and the only way to encounter this self is to encounter it in relationship.

Love and faith are both a search, a process, it doesn't stay the same; it comes and goes. In some people, it's asleep for a long time and then it wakes up as it evolves.

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.

My mood altered and the pain turned to rage.

The part of us that has to be burned away is something like the deadwood on the bush; it has to go, to be burned in the terrible fire of reality, until there is nothing left but . . . what we are meant to be.

Doing battle with themselves that way, every day, all the time and sometimes it sucks, but other times it results in people making sort of a dream comprehensible to someone else.

My abyss speaks, I have turned my ultimate depth inside out into the light.

Today I felt pass over me A breath of wind from the wings of madness.

Sometimes I feel as though there are two me's, one coasting directly on top of the other: the superficial me, who nods when she's supposed to nod and says what she's supposed to say, and some other, deeper part, the part that worries and dreams... Most of the time they move along in sync and I hardly notice the split, but sometimes it feels as though I'm two whole different people and I could rip apart at any second.

What we can and should change is ourselves: our impatience, our egoism (including intellectual egoism), our sense of injury, our lack of love and forbearance. I regard every other attempt to change the world, even if it springs from the best intentions, as futile.