James E. Faust Quotes

The greatest challenge of the day is: how to bring about a revolution of the heart, a revolution which has to start with each one of us?

Unless there's a personal transformation, there can be no social transformation.

What you are the world is. And without your transformation, there can be no transformation of the world.

Change happens at the level of the individual

I believe the lasting revolution comes from deep changes in ourselves which influence our collective life.

The craving to change the world is perhaps a reflection of the craving to change ourselves.

There are those who receive as birthright an adequate or at least unquestioned sense of self and those who set out to reinvent themselves, for survival or for satisfaction, and travel far. Some people inherit values and practices as a house they inhabit; some of us have to burn down that house, find our own ground, build from scratch, even as a psychological metamorphosis.

Some form of suffering often brings about a readiness. One can say it cracks open the shell of the egoic mind with which many people identify as "me." Life cracks open that shell, and once that crack is there, then we are reached more easily by spiritual teaching.

Most people tell themselves these excuses - I've always been this way, this is my nature, I can't help it - that are just memes. They're belief systems that keep you from being able to become all that you are intended to become. They're impediments to reaching God-realization, or Tao-centeredness. People lose track of their purpose, because they are so back there - living in their past. Byron Katie speaks about this: Who would you be without your story? Carlos Castaneda used to say if you don't have a story, you don't have to live up to it. So get rid of your story.

You are the world. When you transform yourself, the world you live in will also be transformed.

You never quite know what the change is until, one day, you wake up and go, "Wow, I'm reacting to things differently and I feel differently."

Avoid openly trying to reform people. Every man knows he is imperfect, but he doesn't want someone else trying to correct his faults. If you want to improve a person, help him embrace a higher working goal-a standard, an ideal-and he will do his own 'making over' far more effectively than you can do it for him.

Every individual needs revolution, inner division, overthrow of the existing order, and renewal, but not by forcing them upon his neighbors under the hypocritical cloak of Christian love or the sense of social responsibility or any of the other beautiful euphemisms for unconscious urges to personal power.

I do not act, and people become reformed by themselves.

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

The surest mark of true conversion is humility.

You changed my life. You changed my ways. I don't even recognize myself these days. It must be a reflection of you, only you.

Well, my opinion is that real change occurs through deep interpersonal experiences. Others will also say deep spiritual experiences.

To paraphrase something the anthropologist Ashley Montagu once said, the way I change my life is to act as if I'm the person I want to be. This is, to me, the simplest, wisest advice you can give anyone. When you wake up and act like a loving person, you realize not only that you are altered, but that the people around you are also transformed, because everybody is changed by the reception of this love.

I'm always asking people to do something in their mind [first]. So if they're gonna do one exercise, it would be to ask themselves what they want to change about themselves in the next 12 weeks. Once they solve that, the body will follow.

I have faced uncounted, incalculable number of efforts to convert me. There's no college professor who could do it. In my case, I'm just telling you, it would not have ever, in my life, been possible to convert me to liberalism. So I sometimes live in a little wonderment about how these persuasions to make people liberal and leftist work so easily. And it has to be something at home. Parents have to be leaning that way.

The renewal of our natures is a work of great importance. It is not to be done in a day. We have not only a new house to build up, but an old one to pull down.

The change we are looking for is always a change within ourselves. And the change will come. I've noticed that as long as I'm willing to be different, something or someone arrives to show me how.

I want considerate people to listen to the voice of Aikido. It is not for correcting others; it is for correcting your own mind. This is Aikido. This is the mission of Aikido and should be your mission.

No, you can’t force other people to change. You can, however, change just about everything else. And usually, that’s enough.