Quotes by Marianne Williamson

You must learn a new way to think before you can master a new way to be.

The practice of forgiveness is our most important contribution to the healing of the world.

Forgiveness is not always easy. At times, it feels more painful than the wound we suffered, to forgive the one that inflicted it. And yet, there is no peace without forgiveness.

Certainly there is such a thing as chemical depression, and for that, obviously, there are issues that psychotherapists are much more expert at speaking to, but I think there is a low-grade depression that actually prevails in our society. And most of us feel it.

Politics should not be the least heart-filled thing we do, it should be the most heart-filled thing we do.

If you give your life as a wholehearted response to love, then love will wholeheartedly respond to you.

Politics is in a crisis because it's separated from our deep humanity.

War is just an effect, not a cause.

If I choose to bless another person, I will always end up feeling more blessed.

The first step in forgiveness is the willingness to forgive.

Revolutions are not easy.

And as we let our own light shine we unconsciously give other people the permission to do the same.

Attack thoughts towards others are attack thoughts towards ourselves.

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be.

Everything we do is infused with the energy with which we do it. If we're frantic, life will be frantic. If we're peaceful, life will be peaceful.

Every moment is an invitation to live out of your weakness or to live out of your strength.

We are not held back by the love we didn't receive in the past,
but by the love we're not extending in the present.

Bless more blame less.

The spiritual path is simply the journey of living our lives. Everyone is on a spiritual path; most people just don't know it.

The real axis of social change is not horizontal, but vertical. We don't need a whole bunch of people gathering to think shallow thoughts together. What we need is for as many people as are ready to gather and think deep thoughts together.

Until we have met the monsters in ourselves, we keep trying to slay them in the outer world.

When I went to college in the 1970s, the Women's Liberation movement was all the buzz.

Divine organization is inherent in all things.

I now see that is a woman's God-given role to tend to the home and take care of the children: it's just that the entire planet is our home, and every child on it is one of our children.

I place my life in the hands of God each day. And I trust that He knows what He's doing, even when I do not.

Anyone who isn't confused or conflicted on the topic of Israel probably isn't looking into it too deeply.

Old systems do not fold willingly, particularly when they control gargantuan amounts of wealth and power. But like empires of old -- from the Romans to the Hapsburgs to the colonial British -- even the largest do fall.

Pray for Trump's sanity and clarity, because his power to cause real damage to our country is enormous.

Donald Trump is an innocent child of God, and the democratically chosen president-elect of the United States. We must deeply bow before the first and deeply respect the second.

Political propaganda seeks to affect the way people perceive the world in order to affect the way they behave.

The struggle between Israelis and Palestinians is a perfect reflection of the struggle between fear and forgiveness that rages within us all.

I try to remind myself not to go anywhere or do anything without asking for spiritual direction through prayer and meditation.

The purpose of prayer is the alignment of the mind with the thoughts and the will of God.

Enlightenment is the only real antidote to the world's despair.

Love is what we are born with. Fear is what we learn.

Real love is comforting, to be sure, but not always at first.

Life is a book that never ends. Chapters close, but not the book itself. The end of one physical incarnation is like the end of a chapter, on some level setting up the beginning of another.

Where there is peace, there cannot be chaos; the two cannot coexist at the same time.

Once the light of our awareness is cast on any darkness, then it cannot hide and it cannot remain. Such is the law of consciousness.

We must keep in mind that where the road is crooked, God makes it straight, and where our hearts are wounded, God makes us whole. As we open our hearts in purity and simplicity, admitting to God that we are completely powerless in the area of our problem, His illumination redeems us.

You will fear the darkness only to the extent that you yourself are not providing light.

You've done the bourgeois thing, perhaps, but let's not call that love.

Living in this world, under the dominance of the ego mind, is difficult. That's the struggle.

God is the electricity and we are the lamps.

The only real failure is the failure to grow from what we go through.

I also think the women's movement has unintentionally contributed to the dishonoring of motherhood. It happened because we made such a big deal about our right to go out into the world.

Most women I know are priestesses and healers, although many don't know it yet, and some never will. We are all of us sisters of a mysterious order.

A tulip doesn't strive to impress anyone.

It doesn't struggle to be different than a rose.

It doesn't have to.

It is different.

And there's room in the garden for every flower.

The concept of a divine, or 'Christ'-mind, is the idea that, at our core, we are not just identical, but actually the same being.

If we do not like what we see in the world, we must face what we don't like in ourselves. As we change, the world will change with us.

The miracle is when you shift. The miracle is when you know there is no hill -- you're removing the hill. The miracle is when you realize the time of physical decline can be a time of spiritual incline.

Imagine everything you're experiencing now being a hundred times more wonderful. Bad turns good; good turns great. That is what is possible.

Imagine the week ahead unfolding in an ever-increasing flow of miracles. Allow the image to sink into your heart. Receive it with a big yes!

The key to intimacy is the commitment to honesty and to the radical forgiveness necessary in order for honesty to be safe.

The greatest force of personal liberation is the decision to widen our circle of compassion, moving from focus on self to focus on service.

Mary's was a virgin birth, and the word virgin means a woman unto herself. The actualized woman is powerful unto herself and gives birth to things divine. Today we have the chance to give birth to a healed and transformed world.

Generation after generation can't just be loaded with more and more nuclear weapons and not ultimately dance to that music.

Today is a day for sober and mature reflection, not glee. Mindless celebration is both spiritually inappropriate and politically naive.

We cannot get to our knowledge because the world is too loud. And we tend to make it louder as we cry out in pain, pretending we are singing.

I think future generations will see the invention of the Internet as having been as important as the invention of the printing press. It's the democratizing tool of all tools. As long as no one can control the flow of information, then freedom always has a chance.

No matter what I go through today, I need not fear. For God is all-powerful and God is here. I am never separate from the One who created me. There is nothing I can do to make Him turn his face away from me. I am loved, I am cared for, and I am totally safe in the arms of God.

Forgiveness is 'selective remembering' -- a conscious decision to focus on love and let the rest go.

We need not wait for the world to become more mystical; the world is mystical. Our problem is not that the world lacks magic; our problem is that we don't believe in its magic. We do not show up fully for life, and then wonder why life is not showing up more fully for us.

Choosing joy involves spiritual surrender, and sometimes we would rather hold on to the pain than surrender our egos.

The moment of surrender is not when life is over. It's when it begins.

King Solomon, who supposedly was the wisest of all men, described his youth as his winter and his advanced years as his summer. We can be older than we used to be yet feel much younger than we are.

The world is terrified of joyful women. Make a stand. Be one anyway.

If we never take a risk, we'll never know the parts of ourselves that would have emerged if we had.

I used to feel like I was waiting for someone to discover me, to 'produce' me, like Lana Turner at the drugstore. Utlimately I realized that the person I was waiting for was myself. If we wait for the world's permission to shine, we will never receive it.

It is our own thoughts that hold the key to miraculous transformation.

I am a student of universal spiritual principles, and I read theology and spiritual writings, so my grasp of basic spiritual principles is fairly good.

Love is a wave flowing in the direction of bliss for all living things. It will carry you if you allow it to flow through you.

My hope is that I'm getting better and wiser. With every book, I have more of myself to pour onto the page.

The Queen is coming to reclaim her girls.

We can't look to the world to restore our worth; we're here to restore our worth to the world. The world outside us can reflect our glory, but it cannot create it. It cannot crown us. Only God can crown us, and he already has.

When a woman gives birth, two are born: a baby from the womb of its mother and a woman from the womb of her former existence.

Be the most wonderful expression of you that you're capable of.

We need more than a new politics; what we need is a new worldview. We need a fundamentally different bottom line.

The Republican corporatists are worse than the Democratic corporatists, but only to a degree. And Republican corporatists are at least true to their principles, however abhorrent those principles might be to some of us.

We want spiritual principles to be more than beautiful abstractions; we want them to actually transform our lives.

Love is not neutral. It takes a stand. It is a commitment to the attainment of the conditions of peace for everyone involved in a situation.

The places in our personality where we tend to deviate from love are not out faults, but our wounds. God doesn't want to punish us, but to heal us. And that is how He wishes us to view the wounds in other people.

The spiritual commitment is to make every situation an object of devotional connection.

In our ability to think about something differently lies the power to make it different.

Sex is not the ultimate high, but the ultimate high hangs out around sex. The ultimate high is the dance with another person, played so deep down and with such abandon that glee returns to grown-ups.

For a society as abundant and as blessed as ours, to have as many disadvantaged children as we have does not bode well for our long-term economic future.

I feel that if your soul was branded by the sixties, you never lost the brand. It's like going into a nightclub and having your hand stamped so that you don't have to come back but you can come back.

The universe is conspiring at this moment to bring you happiness and peace.

Corporate totalitarianism means total control by corporate interests. If they want a war, they get a war. If they want GMOs, they get GMOs. If they want fracking, they get fracking. If they want big banks to control our monetary policy, big banks control our monetary policy.

I see the universe as naturally and infinitely self-correcting.

The universe is not only self-organizing, it is also self-correcting.

A level of anxiety and tension and outright fear that so many people have felt, not only during the recession but during this slow economic recovery since. This made me very much want to up the conversation about how miracle-minded thinking applies to that area of life.

Without nourishing our own souls, we can't nourish the world, for we cannot give what we do not have. As we attend to our souls, we emanate invisibly and involuntarily the light we have received.

The sense of endings as well as beginnings in the air is now so obvious in so many dimensions of our experience that a critical mass has been reached.

Think of the mystical three days between the crucifixion and the resurrection as the time it takes for a situation to change once spirit has infused our consciousness. As we come to look at an experience differently, in time in begins to transform.

The gap is not between knowing it and living it, it's between knowing it and living it consistently. You know, we've all had moments when we got it right. Most of us have moments when we get it right every day. The trouble is getting it right when a curve-ball comes at us.

Whatever we put out, it's coming back to us. The universe keeps a perfect set of books.

I feel that as women we've allowed ourselves to be deluded by certain ideas that hold us back, such as the over-glorification of masculine consciousness.

The world we knew as children is still buried within our minds. Our childlike self is the deepest level of our being. It is who we really are, and what is real doesn't go away.

Fuzzy thinking is, after all, just one step above not thinking at all. But to take the ideas of serious transformational thinkers and philosophers and throw the new age label at them is also abhorrent.