Marianne Williamson

Love is what we’re born with. Fear is what we learned here.

The choice to follow love through to its completion is the choice to seek completion within ourselves. The point at which we shut down on others is the point at which we shut down on life.

Men have to do some awfully mean things to keep up their respectability.

To me the sole hope of human salvation lies in teaching Man to regard himself as an experiment in the realization of God, to regard his hands as God’s hand, his brain as God’s brain, his purpose as God’s purpose. He must regard God as a helpless Longing, which longed him into existence by its desperate need for an executive organ.

Suspicion amongst thoughts are like bats amongst birds, they never fly by twilight.

The man who is ostentatious of his modesty is twin to the statue that wears a fig-leaf.

Promise, large promise, is the soul of an advertisement.

Whenever you wish to do anything against the law, Cicely, always consult a good solicitor first.

You. Not wanting me. Was the beginning of me wanting myself. Thank you.

Hatred is the coward’s revenge for being intimidated.

I was not the lion, but it fell to me to give the lion’s roar.

Want of foresight, unwillingness to act when action would be simple and effective, lack of clear thinking, confusion of counsel until the emergency comes, until self-preservation strikes its jarring gongthese are the features which constitute the endless repetition of history.

Our virtues are dearer to us the more we have had to suffer for them. It is the same with our children. All profound affection entertains a sacrifice. Our thoughts are often worse than we are, just as they are often better.

Nations! What are nations? Tartars! and Huns! and Chinamen! Like insects they swarm. The historian strives in vain to make them memorable. It is for want of a man that there are so many men. It is individuals that populate the world.

The generative energy, which, when we are loose, dissipates and makes us unclean, when we are continent invigorates and inspires us. Chastity is the flowering of man; and what are called Genius, Heroism, Holiness, and the like, are but various fruits which succeed it.

Sir, a man may be so much of everything, that he is nothing of anything.

We learn geology the morning after the earthquake.