Norman Cousins Quotes

As far as I'm concerned, the spiritual life is just like any other endeavor-you can succeed or fail. And when the goal is actual evolution beyond ego in an intersubjective context, success or failure is plain for all to see.

If anyone steps on your ego, instantly, he becomes your enemy. But a Guru is a friend who constantly tramples your ego.

Such excessive preoccupation with his faults is not a truly spiritual activity but, on the contrary, a highly egoistic one.The recognition of his own faults should make a man humbler, when it is beneficial, not prouder, which the thought that he ought to have been above these faults makes him.

We are searching for the core of our lives; our culture intuits that writing, that ancient activity, might be the pathway...Awakening does not feed ego's needs and desires; it pulverizes the self. Our society couldn't knowingly bear such reduction, so we've tricked ourselves into the same path but call it writing.

The instinct that pulls us toward art is the impulse to evolve, to learn, to heighten and elevate our consciousness. The Ego hates this. Because the more awake we become, the less we need the Ego.

The more you prune a plant, the more it grows. So too the more you seek to annihilate the ego, the more it will increase. You should seek the root of the ego and destroy it.

Enlightenment is ego's ultimate disappointment.

This is something basic to be understood - the ego must come to a peak, it must be strong, it must have attained an integrity - only then can you dissolve it. A weak ego cannot be dissolved. And this becomes a problem.

By constantly keep one's attention on the Source, the ego is dissolved in that Source like a salt-doll in the sea.

Discard yourself and thereby regain yourself. Spread the trap of humility and ensnare love.

Transcendence gets you beyond ego. If you go beyond ego, you see all of this in a more decent perspective and you can start to put all the pieces together. We haven't done that yet. Not as a civilization.

Then relationship happens. Before that it is just an empty name. Relationship cannot happen before the egos are gone.

Meditation is not growth of the ego, it is death of the ego.

The complementary movement towards divine love is growth in humility which is the acceptence of the reality about ourselves, our own weakness and limitations.

Enlightenment is not a complete remedy.

True progress comes not through action, but through awakening.

the self expands through acts of self forgetfulness.

To reach perfection, we must all pass, one by one, through the death of self-effacement.

The biggest ego trip is getting rid of your ego, and of course the joke of it all is that your ego does not exist.

A disciple asked, "Who is a Master?" The Master replied, "Anyone to whom it is given to let go of the ego. Such a person's life is then a masterpiece.

We can deceive ourselves into thinking we are developing spirituality when instead we are strengthening our egocentricity through spiritual techniques.

The sacred duty of being an individual is to gradually learn how to live so as to awaken the eternal within you.

We are on a very rich emotional and physical journey on this planet.

A change in external circumstances without inner renewal is a materialist's illusion, as though man were only a product of his social circumstance and nothing else.

We participate in the creation of the world by decreating ourselves.