Anne Lamott Quotes

Begin to be now what you will be hereafter.

Your emotional reactions to the evil you encounter and your judgments of it show you what you need to change in yourself. Changing those parts of your personality that judge, react in fear, and cannot love into acceptance, fearlessness, and love is the journey you were born to make.

Your outer journey may contain a million steps; your inner journey only has one: the step you are taking right now.

I am not what I ought to be! Ah! how imperfect and deficient! - I am not what I wish to be! I 'abhor what is evil,' and I would 'cleave to what is good!' - I am not what I hope to be! Soon, soon, I shall put off mortality: and with mortality all sin and imperfection! Yet, though I am not what I ought to be, nor what I wish to be, nor what I hope to be, I can truly say, I am not what I once was - a slave to sin and Satan; and I can heartily join with the Apostle, and acknowledge; By the grace of God, I am what I am!

Disabused of our illusions by much travel and travail, we awaken one day to find that the sacred center is here and now - in every moment of the journey, everywhere in the world around us, and deep within our own hearts.

Find the journey's end in every step.

This is not a matter of virtue-it's a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default-setting, which is to be deeply and literally self-centered, and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self.

To travel is to take a journey into yourself.

I haven't always been the person I am today. I came into loving myself more than anything or anyone else.

We should not judge people by their peak of excellence; but by the distance they have traveled from the point where they started.

Part of spiritual and emotional maturity is recognizing that it's not like you're going to try to fix yourself and become a different person. You remain the same person, but you become awakened.

My goal is always transformation. I love to watch people transform their lives, which includes their inner world and their outer world.

The distance between who you are and who you might be is closing.

Kabbalah is all about change. It isn't about being proud of our good qualities: the wisdom is about transforming our darkness into light.

Not only will this make you treat each moment more preciously, but you will be more patient with yourself and with others, recognizing that there are millions of moments on the path to any worthwhile achievement.

When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be.

I've learned that the perfect picture that I hold in my mind of what my life looks like is constantly changing, growing, evolving. I remind myself that I am exactly where I need to be in my life; otherwise, I would surely be somewhere else.

Social revolutions and group revolutions are good, and we need that, but we also need personal revolution - revolution within ourselves that change who we are as people.

You have to lose yourself to find yourself.

To become different from what we are, we must have some awareness of what we are.

You express different energies at different times in your life.

In order to change the world, you have to get your head together first.

I believe that the plight of life and all existence is to master one's self, you know, one day at a time.

You cannot travel within and stand still without.

The delights of self-discovery are always available.