Think of your career as your ministry. Make your work an expression of love, in service to mankind. Within the worldly illusion, we all have different jobs. Some of us are artists, some of us are business people, some of us are scientists. But in the real world that lies beyond all this, we all have the same job: to minister to human hearts.
Marianne WilliamsonIt can take years of tears to melt the hardness that develops in this world, covering our tender, gentler inner selves. Tears for every devastating loss, tears for every humiliating failure, tears for every repeated mistake. Those who honor those tears, and even honor them, are not failures at love but rather its true initiates. First the pain and then the power. First the heart breaks and then it soars.
Marianne WilliamsonA 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.
Marianne WilliamsonWhen you carry yesterday's thinking into today, you program tomorrow to be like yesterday.
Marianne WilliamsonWe were all born carrying a promise -- a promise to make the world better -- and there's a yearning to make good on that promise that none of us can suppress forever.
Marianne WilliamsonWhat's difficult in life is to stay centered when somebody does or says something that tempts us to close our hearts because their heart was closed. That is hard. But that is also how we grow. We go through those circumstances in order to evolve into people who can hold to our loving center no matter what the world throws us.
Marianne WilliamsonYou don't want to try to protect yourself from the pain of a crisis. You want to learn everything you can from it.
Marianne WilliamsonI 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.
Marianne WilliamsonI don't believe there are any powers, which in the larger sense, are unnatural or even supernatural. I think we just do not yet scientifically understand all of the powers inherent in the human consciousness, and the more attuned we are to the realm of spirit, the more our conscious mind is available to subconscious, spiritual prompting.
Marianne WilliamsonThe solution to low self-esteem is to get over yourself and get a higher purpose.
Marianne WilliamsonSome people think it's naive to think we can make love our new bottom line. What I believe is naive is thinking human civilization as we know it will survive another two hundred years if we do not.
Marianne WilliamsonLove and fear represent two different lenses through which to view the world. Which I choose to use will determine what I think I see.
Marianne WilliamsonTo become romantic artists, we must pierce the armor that hides our hearts, and the piercing is not comfortable.
Marianne WilliamsonThe issue of spiritual power is to meet the limited mortal circumstance with unlimited thought.
Marianne WilliamsonWe arrogantly assume that the nervous system doesn't really need to be coaxed into romance. That romance comes from some other place.
Marianne WilliamsonYou will fear the darkness only to the extent that you yourself are not providing light.
Marianne WilliamsonLove isn't material. It's energy... We experience it as kindness, giving, mercy, compassion, peace, joy, acceptance, non-judgment, joining and intimacy.
Marianne WilliamsonLove is to fear as light is to dark; in the presence of one, the other cannot exist. So wherever there is a place of fear in your life, think of one thing - even if it's just a thought you can think-where you can generate love to cast out the fear.
Marianne WilliamsonPhysically, we get older and then we die. Yet spiritually, whether we go backward or forward is a matter not of the body but of consciousness. When we think about age differently, then our experience of it changes. We can be physically older but emotionally and psychologically younger. Some of us were in a state of decay in our 20s and are in a state of re-birth in our 60s or 70s. 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.
Marianne WilliamsonThere is a lot to look at when you are serious about transformation. You look at everything you've ever done, every circumstance you've ever been in, cleaning up everything in your past. Reconciling, forgiving others, forgiving yourself. It's a lot of work, actually.
Marianne WilliamsonWe're often afraid to do anything unless we know we can do it extremely well. But we get to Carnegie Hall by practicing. I remember how freeing it was several years ago to read in an interview with Joan Baez that some of Bob Dylan's early songs weren't so wonderful. We have this image of genius springing fully grown out of Zeus' forehead.
Marianne WilliamsonThe fact is, there are Fortune 500 companies that have been founded during recessions.
Marianne WilliamsonIt is not your job to seek for love. It IS your job to seek within yourself all the barriers against its coming.
Marianne WilliamsonThe number of nuclear bombs on the planet today - the sheer quantity of weapons of mass destruction in the possession of people and governments throughout the world - along with the fact that the use of brute force and militarism is an almost knee-jerk way of problem-solving on the planet today, makes the eradication of war the great moral issue of this generation.
Marianne WilliamsonAchievement doesn't come from what we do, but from who we are. Our worldly power results from our personal power. Our career is an extension of our personality.
Marianne WilliamsonAnytime you try to be a loving person, you're doing your part to save the world.
Marianne WilliamsonAs long as you identify with the universe - which is perfect and can correct material conditions to bring them back into alignment with that Divine perfection - as long as that is where your mind is aligned, it's as though there were two parallel universes. You decide with every thought you think which one you're going to inhabit. Two parallel universes of experience, as it were.
Marianne WilliamsonOften faith isn't hoping that good times are coming; it's trying to see that the good times are here.
Marianne WilliamsonCreating the world we want is a much more subtle but more powerful mode of operation than destroying the one we don't want.
Marianne WilliamsonOur problem is not that we don't have power, so much as that we tend to not use the power we have.
Marianne WilliamsonThe way of the miracle-worker is to see all human behavior as one two things: either love, or a call for love.
Marianne WilliamsonWe must relinquish our passive observation of the world outside; we can open the door to the world we want. In understanding ourselves, we come to understand the world. In allowing ourselves to heal, we become the healers of the world. In praying for peace, we become bringers of peace. Thus we actualize the power within us to remedy the psychic wounds of humanity.
Marianne WilliamsonOur challenge is to not look away, but rather to transform the field; to create a new political conversation, our own conversation, out of which we can speak our truth in our own way.
Marianne WilliamsonI personally am not a total pacifist. I do believe there is such a thing as a just war. I believe, for instance, the effort to destroy the Nazi regime militarily was justified military action.
Marianne WilliamsonMeaning doesn't lie in things. Meaning lies in us. When we attach value to things that aren't love - the money, the car, the house, the prestige - we are loving things that can't love us back. We are searching for meaning in the meaningless. Money, of itself, means nothing. Material things, of themselves, mean nothing. It's not that they're bad. It's that they're nothing. ("A Return to Love")
Marianne WilliamsonSometimes the purpose of a day is to merely feel our sadness, knowing that as we do, we allow whole layers of grief, like old skin cells to drop off us
Marianne WilliamsonCitizens 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.
Marianne Williamson