Quotes by Marianne Williamson
(Page 2 of 6)

You are emerging from the cocoon of your former self. There are no limits to the extent of the transformation that's possible for you.

As difficult as it can be to find genuine inner calm, it is the key to creating peace in the world as we know it. The world will not change until we do, and there is nothing the world can deliver to us that will give us the peace we crave. Peace comes not from the world, but from God.

People hear you on the level you speak to them from. Speak from your heart, and they will hear with theirs.

First there was the word. A Course in Miracles says that prayer is the medium of miracles. It's the realm of thought where we are aligned with the thought of God and therefore in a co- creative mode. It's where we surrender our minds to His mind and become empowered.

A Course in Miracles tells us that although 'we think that without the ego, all would be chaos, the opposite is true. Without the ego, all would be love.'

Conscious awareness is the source of our healing...Only when you say the truth can the truth set you free. This is not a negative process, but at times it is a difficult process.

The purpose of daily prayer is the cultivation of a sense of the sacred. Sacred energy renews us.

Our career is not something that we go out and *find.* Your perfect career is something that emerges from deep within you. When you are aligned with the truth within yourself, then you magnetize people and circumstances which align with that truth.

The deepest feelings always show themselves in silence.

If you think humanity can get itself out of all this mess without divine help, then you're not being hopeful -- you're hallucinating.

If we had the government we deserved we would have the most righteous government, because we deserve the best -- everybody does.

You're on this earth with a divine purpose: to rise to the level of your highest creative possibility, expressing all that you are intellectually, emotionally, psychologically, and physically in order to make the universe a more beautiful place.

Instead of praying: 'Dear God, bring me someone fabulous,' try: 'Dear God, make me into someone fabulous.'

Dear God, I surrender this thought to you, for I would see the miracle that lies behind it. Amen.

There is a point at which we begin to receive a diminishing return on the accumulation of sacred knowledge unless we use it to at least try to improve the world.

Do not fear. Look beyond what's dying to what's being born.

Angels light the way. Angels do not begrudge anyone anything, angels do not tear down, angels do not compete, angels do not constrict their hearts, angels do not fear. That's why they sing and that's how they fly. We, of course, are only angels in disguise.

We need more than new policies. We need a new worldview, and a new bottom line. We need to replace economic values as our ordering principle, with humanitarian values as our ordering principle.

In the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., No lie will last forever. We have to work at removing lies from our own hearts. And on the national level, we do this not because we blame our country, but because we love it.

If our emotional stability is based on what other people do or do not do, then we have no stability. If our emotional stability is based on love that is changeless and unalterable, then we attain the stability of God.

Miracles occur naturally as expressions of love. When you choose to love, you choose to work miracles.

The past doesn't determine your future unless you carry it with you into the present. Forgiving yourself and others, you free the universe to begin again at any moment.

Until we have seen someone's darkness, we don't really know who they are. Until we have forgiven someone's darkness, we don't really know what love is.

Part of forgiving people is releasing them from our own agendas.

So it is that a new politics centers around the arousal of that power, using prayer and meditation to create a force field of transformation.

You can live in your total potential creative capacity in an instant-with your heart open to give and receive love.

What the ego doesn't want us to see is that our pain doesn't come from the love we weren't given in the past, but from the love we ourselves aren't giving in the present.

To the ego mind, surrender means giving up. To the spiritual mind, surrender means giving in and receiving.

Every ending is a new beginning. Through the grace of God, we can always start again. (Page 120.).

America is a great country, and we've done a lot of good in the world. But we are a collection of people, not saints. We have our own sins to atone for.

Give all your gifts away in service to the world.  If you want to paint, don't wait for a grant, paint a wall in your town that looks drab and uninviting.  You never know who is going to see that wall. Whatever it is you want to do, give it away in service to your community.

Once we truly understand that God's will is that we be happy, we no longer feel the need to ask for anything other than that God's will be done.

In every heart there is an inner room, where we can hold our greatest treasures and our deepest pain.

The universe is intentional. It is always moving in the direction of greater love, regardless whether or not we consciously align with that love.

Love will not just heal your life or mine. Love will heal the world.

A hero is someone who stands in the community and speaks their hopes and speaks their passion. That's almost an act of heroism nowadays because higher consciousness is so trivialized.

Every bird that sings, sings for you. Every breeze that blows, blows for you. Every sunray shines for you. If you only knew how loved you are.

You have to make a space in your heart, in your mind and in your life itself for authentic human connection.

I'm better than I used to be.
Better than I was yesterday.
But hopefully
not as good as I'll be tomorrow.

The opportunities for infinite possibility exist no matter what age we are.

Imagine that anything is possible, and name the most amazing thing that could happen in 2013.

The problem with most intimate relationships is that they are not romantic. They do not involve a deeper knowing, and thus there is diminished possibility of sacred, transformative sharing.

It takes mystical insight to see the beauty and innocence in each other, even when that is not what we are showing to the world. That is why God is needed in intimate relationships, to move us beyond the perceptions that can so often poison love.

I'm certainly not saying anything new, and I'm not even saying anything all that different from what everyone else I know is saying right now -- I'm saying what millions of people are saying. I'm just saying it publicly.

The key to happiness is the decision to be happy.

Every aspect of life is pre-programmed to rise to its highest creative possibility. We don't have to make that happen, but we have to allow it to happen. And that itself is the struggle of life: resisting the resistant mind.

When we stay close to the wisdom of our knowing, seeking solutions to our problems in the sanctuary of the heart and not in the vanity of the mind, then we can pretty much trust in the unfolding, mysterious wisdom of life.

Yes, hardships come. But I see in my life and in the lives of others how often something that does not have to be held as a hardship is dealt with by the mind as though it is.

I was very much a child of the 1960s. I protested the Vietnam War and grew up in a fairly politicized home. My father was like a cross between William Kunstler and Zorba the Greek. I grew up among left-wing lawyers.

We are to love our enemies that they might be returned to their right minds.

We need to change society's ordering principle from economic to humanitarian values, from money as the bottom line to love as the bottom line.

There is no greater gift to future generations than that we do the work God has asked us to do: love one another, that the world might be made right.

If you allow yourself to deepen with midlife, your experience of everything deepens, including your experience of God.

I don't believe the United States is going through a midlife crisis. The United States is going through an adolescent crisis.

The masculine DOES while the feminine IS. Major in the feminine, but minor in the masculine.

We are likely to feel better when we go to bed tonight if we have an internal sense that we spent our lives meaningfully today.

No matter what the problem, a miracle can solve it. Remember to ask for one.

When you understand the law of divine compensation, you realize that in the presence of spiritual consciousness, there is more than enough compensation for any diminishment in materiality.

The love within us is meant to extend outward. The closer we grow to our inner light, we feel a natural urge to share it. We all long for meaningful work, some creative endeavor that will be our ministry, by which the energies within us might flow out to help heal the world.

Until we see love as the meaning of life, life seems to have no meaning at all. The sense of meaninglessness produces chaos, and the chaos produces fear. There is only one way out of this, and that is to see every moment and every situation as an invitation to love.

Our most meaningful conversations go on late at night when we're on the phone with our friends or talking to our lovers.

Nothing that happened before this moment has any power over you whatsoever, except to the extent to which you carry it into this moment. Dwell in the present with full forgiveness of yourself and others, and your life will be lifted to divine right order...perfection, prosperity and peace.

When infants aren't held, they can become sick, even die. It's universally accepted that children need love, but at what age are people supposed to stop needing it? We never do. We need love in order to live happily, as much as we need oxygen in order to live at all.

I think moral outrage is born not of anger but of love. It comes from the highest in us, not from a low-level sense of anger or cynicism.

If you have a longing in your heart to hear a deeper truth, there's a mysterious way in which that truth will find you.

Citizens should be looked to for what they can give of their own nobility, virtue, creative thinking, passion, and natural talent for community building and relating to others.

Motherly love -- putting the care of children before every other consideration -- is the ultimate intelligence of nature.

Joy is our goal, our destiny. We cannot know who we are except in joy. Not knowing joy, we do not know ourselves.

Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous?

Angels are thoughts of God -- to pray to an angel is to look to a level of pure thinking, divine thinking, and to ask that it replace our thoughts of fear.

There are other kinds of emotional pain that emerge from our own mistaken thinking. As we surrender that pain, we are inviting into our thought system a guide who will lead us to different thoughts. It's like the song Amazing Grace: I was blind and now I see.

Go forth in confidence and go forth in peace. For there are angels to your left and angels to your right; angels in front of you and angels behind you; angels above you and angels below. You are loved, and you are not alone.

Whatever situation you're in: Send love, place it in God's hands, open your heart to everyone involved -- and it will turn out miraculously.

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. And so our goal in any situation becomes inner peace.

Fear unchecked grows exponentially. Love poured forth has the power to remove it. Thus is the power of God in our lives.

The return to love is hardly the end of life's adventure.  It's the real beginning.  A course in miracle says we think we have many different problems but we really only have one:  denying love is the only problem and embracing it is the only answer.

When the wisdom of the heart replaces the chatter of the mind, The power of Love flows forth.

Magic happens when you tell the universe what you want it to do for you; miracles happen when you ask how you can be of service to the universe.

My biggest past mistakes have been when I made decisions out of ego rather than spirit. When I acted too quickly. When I wasn't contemplative or reflective or prayerful enough, and I ended up making what I would only later see to be unwise decisions.

It takes great courage and personal strength to hold on to our center during times of great hurt. It takes wisdom to understand that our reactiveness only fans the flames of false drama.

I don't think pain is a prerequisite for growth, but on the other hand, most of us choose very painful ways to learn.

Hope is born of participation in hopeful solutions.

I do believe 50 is the new 40 and 60 is the new 50. Hell, maybe 60 can be the new 40, I don't know. I believe that when we give ourselves permission, we can live with an excitement and heat and passion that most women in previous generations were unable to attain.

You don't want to try to protect yourself from the pain of a crisis. You want to learn everything you can from it.

We shouldn't come up with a pseudo-spiritual excuse for turning away from the pain of the world.

Fear is a psychic tyrant that has no intention of letting its slave go free. It will say whatever it needs to say to confuse your thinking... It will always seek to preserve itself.

I tell my mother I went to God in spite of my religious education. I feel that my religious education was inadequate, but that doesn't mean that Judaism was inadequate.

A long-term romance is like a rose bush. In any given season, a blossom might fall off. But if the plant is well nourished, then the season will come around again, and new blossoms appear.

We have great power to affect the attitudes and behavior of the people around us, at work and at home. We have the power to set a tone of honor, to create an energy around ourselves that says, 'I respect myself. I respect you. Let's respect each other.'

It's difficult to be alive in America today and truly be in denial anymore. It's not hip to be unconscious or uninvolved. One of our great strengths is that we're an optimistic people, but that doesn't mean we don't have sad days.

Even a happy life has a sad day. We fail to provide a context which says it's okay to cry, it's okay to be sad. So I think making the space for suffering is so important and making space for this expression of feelings in community.

When many people think of new age they think of crystals and purple decals and ceramic angels in people's windows and a kind of fuzzy thinking -- which is abhorrent to a serious person.

Making our goal anything other than peace is emotionally self-destructive.

Think of your career as your ministry. Make your work an expression of love in service to mankind.

To be truly seen and understood -- in all our innocence and glory and yes, our brokenness, too -- is to be delivered into the spiritual ethers where both seen and seer are healed.

What we really need to avoid is this epidemic of false positivism and false happiness, which says if it hurts, it must be bad. Sometimes it hurts because you have a conscience.

As you get older, life gets harder if you're not applying spiritual truths.

It's soul force that removed the English from India. It's soul force that brought down the Berlin Wall. It's soul force that gave life to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s struggle for civil rights.

My father's politics were old-fashioned in the sense that he used to say, all the time, You've got to fight the system! But my spiritual beliefs have led me to believe that the fight is the problem.

Spiritual growth is like childbirth: you dilate, then you contract, you dilate, then you contract again. as painful as it all feels, it's the necessary rhythm for reaching the ultimate goal of total openness.