Martha Beck Quotes

I was a personality before I became a person - I am simple, complex, generous, selfish, unattractive, beautiful, lazy and driven.

I don't necessarily agree with everything I say.

I think people have to choose between living with contradictions or painting themselves into a corner. I have a lot of contradictions.

To be okay with not knowing is a sign of a mature person and a mature society.

I'll just take amusement at being a paradox.

I asked the Zebra, are you black with white stripes? Or white with black stripes? And the zebra asked me, Are you good with bad habits? Or are you bad with good habits? Are you noisy with quiet times? Or are you quiet with noisy times? Are you happy with some sad days? Or are you sad with some happy days? Are you neat with some sloppy ways? Or are you sloppy with some neat ways? And on and on and on and on and on and on he went. I’ll never ask a zebra about stripes...again.

There are questions I'm still not wise enough to answer, just wise enough to no longer ask.

Travel at its truest is thus an ironic experience, and the best travellers . . . seem to be those able to hold two or three inconsistent ideas in their minds at the same time, or able to regard themselves as at once serious persons and clowns.

I've spent my life cultivating knowledge of myself. But the more I know myself, the more utterly mysterious I become.

Judging others makes us blind, whereas love is illuminating. By judging others we blind ourselves to our own evil and to the grace which others are just as entitled to as we are.

Everybody has his own theatre, in which he is manager, actor, prompter, playwright, sceneshifter, boxkeeper, doorkeeper, all in one, and audience into the bargain.

I am not myself in any degree ashamed of having changed my opinions.

A mind that practices love cannot love.

Why shouldn't I be introspective? We dont' make sense." "Neither do Chocolate and Peanut Butter, but it somehow works." He says "Somehow the mixture of two things is genius.

Half of me knows too much to be carefree. But the other half knows enough to be grateful.

I think that being mindful of your own biases tends to lead you into ambiguity, not clarity, and that following those ambiguities is the only way to approach the universal.

I'd always thought of myself as an open-minded person. I had no patience with anyone who put down other kids because of their race, religion, or sexuality. But that's just one kind of open-mindedness. There's another kind, too, the kind that's willing to see people for who they really are and admit when you were wrong about them. That's the part I still need to work on.

To accept duality is to earn identity.

One realizes after a long time that, actually, we are contradictory, all of us.

We must be willing to take an honest look at ourselves and step out beyond our judgmental mind. It is here that we will have a life-altering shift in perception, an opening of our heart.

I'm very judgmental person. It's one of my faults.

Where music thundered let the mind be still, Where the will triumphed let there be no will, What light revealed, now let the dark fulfill.

There's a part of you that you can get a hold of, and there's a part of you that you can never get a hold of, and those are opposite things. Who are you? Which one are you? You are combinations of opposites.

For every seeing soul, there are two absorbing facts - I, and the abyss.

People are always calling me a mirror and if a mirror looks into a mirror, what is there to see?