Marianne Williamson Quotes

You can learn a lesson the first time, when it's presented in a package that is joyous - or at least palatable. But if you don't learn the lesson the first time, then there will be a second time and a third time. And each time it will just get harder and harder.

Faith doesn't mean you don't have to do the work; it just means you're absolutely certain the work will pay off.

Political system is contrary to everything a feminine heart stands for. It lacks tenderness. It lacks poetry. It doesn't nurture. It doesn't love. And without those things, a woman's soul is bereft.

Pleasure can be used to enslave a people just as effectively as pain.

Again--nothing you do or think or wish or make is necessary to establish your worth.

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

The universe is wired with the electricity of God, & each of us is a lamp. It doesn't matter the size or shape of the lamp; it only matters that the lamp is plugged in. With every prayer, every thought of forgiveness, every meditation, every act of love, we plug in. The more of us who plug in, to more the darkness of the world will be cast from our midst. Today, let's all increase love's wattage!

Whatever outrageous dream keeps flowing across your mind, allow it to live inside you. Don't deflect it, diminish it, invalidate it or come up with some excuse for why it can't happen. This will allow it to explain itself to you - why it's there, what it means, and what if anything you should do about it.

Family... a group experience of love and support.

There's a collective knowing that a dimension of reality exists beyond the material plane, and that sense of knowing is causing a mystical resurgence on the planet today. It's not just children who are looking for a missing piece. It is a very mature outlook to question the nature of our reality.

The desire for transcendence is intimately connected with the desire for creativity. It is just as essential to who and what we are.

In asking for miracles, we are seeking a practical goal: a return to inner peace. We’re not asking for something outside us to change, but for something inside us to change. We’re looking for a softer orientation to life.

The people who have achieved more than you, in any area, are only a half step ahead of you in time. Bless them and praise their gifts, and bless and praise your own. The world would be less rich without their contributions, and it would be less rich without yours. There's more than room for everyone; in fact, there's a need for everyone.

As we become purer channels for God's light, we develop an appetite for the sweetness that is possible in this world. A miracle worker is not geared toward fighting the world that is, but toward creating the world that could be.

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

Spiritual growth involves giving up the stories of your past so the universe can write a new one.

Happiness is the choice I make today. It does not rest on my circumstances, but on my frame of mind...In cultivating the habits of happiness, I attract the people and situations that match its frequency. I smile more often, give praise more often, give thanks more often, and am glad more often. For such is my choice today.

Use each interaction to be the best, most powerful version of yourself.

I don't think that anything that anyone is doing today that is being pointed at as the "enemy" or "the problem" is as dangerous to our future as the fact that there are so many pointed fingers. The pointed finger is the enemy.

What a Beethoven, Shakespeare or Picasso has done is not create something, so much as they have accessed that place within themselves from which they could express that which has been created by God.

Enlightenment doesn't mean we were never wounded; it means we've found a way to evolve beyond our wounds. Enlightenment isn't idealistic; it's practical. What's idealistic is thinking we can live from our wounds, stay in our weakness, and ever transform the world.

Often on a journey of spiritual transformation, that is ultimately what heals the pain: the veil is removed from in front of our own eyes and we see where we had been thinking thoughts that would inevitably lead to pain. Until we change those thoughts, the pain will remain.

Imagine how differently American business would function were our faith in the power of goodness to replace our faith in the power of money. Huge industries would no longer make billions of dollars on activities that diminish the well-being and safety of our children, our health, and our environment, on the pretext that it's "just business." To put money before goodness is idolatry, and the laws of the universe ensure that in the end all idols will fall.

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

When we do align with it, we thrive. And when we do not, we suffer. This is not "punishment." It is merely the Law of Cause and Effect. With each thought we think, we either align with universal love, or we disconnect ourselves from it. Whichever is our choice determines whether we then feel connected to, or disconnected, from our own true Selves.

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.

When you look at obesity in the United States, clearly it is not a bunch of stupid people. It has nothing to do with intelligence. Sometimes people who are dealing with issues of obesity and compulsive eating know more than I will ever know about nutrition, metabolism, and exercise, because they have studied it. But clearly the real problem, and therefore the real solution, is on another level of consciousness, and that is where the spiritual work comes in.

Our thoughts about the future go far toward creating it; our minds and hears are like filaments taht connect today to tomorrow, they are conduits for either the status quo or the emergence of different, hopefully more loving, possibilities. How we think and how we behave determine where we are going

The human race is almost addicted to war. It's like we just can't stop.

Chaos often fosters the greatest creativity. Breakdowns often precede the greatest breakthroughs. And when the pain is greatest is often when we're on the brink of the greatest realization.....When the pain is burned through rather than numbed, when our darkness is brought to light and then forgiven, then and only then can we move on. And move on we do.

You know what we need to heal are the thought forms and the feelings that cause us to create war and mass destruction on this kind of a level, because ultimately if we are to survive as a species, we have to become a human race for whom the thought of war is unthinkable.

We're often afraid of looking at our shadow because we want to avoid the shame or embarrassment that comes along with admitting mistakes.

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.

The way to have the life we want is to receive more deeply the life we have. Sometimes we keep our own life at arm's length, thinking we'll wait until circumstances improve before giving it all we've got. But life is just a reflection of consciousness, so it's never going to give any more to us than we give to it. Don't wait for a perfect life; breathe in the life that's already perfect.

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.

Lives with no more sense of spiritual meaning than that provided by shopping malls, ordinary television, and stagnant workplaces are barren lives indeed. Spirituality enriches culture.

You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure about you. We were born to manifest the glory of God that is within us.

We shouldn’t use our own upset as an excuse for not helping.

Love knows how to form itself. God will do his work if we do ours. Our job is to prepare ourselves for love. When we do, love finds us every time.

Imagine everything you're experiencing now being a hundred times more wonderful. Bad turns good; good turns great. THAT IS WHAT IS POSSIBLE.

My father was a deeply committed humanitarian. He was a fighter for social justice. He was spirited in the deepest sense.

God is the electricity and we are the lamps.

God is definitely out of the closet.

I think those of us on a spiritual journey can help create a new conversation, a new America, and a new world.

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.

We can invoke spiritual compensation when we find ourselves in situations of material lack.

What is happening today is that there are millions of children who are not lifted up to the first rung of the ladder. Then they are condemned when they don't know how to climb from there.

Carrying the past in to the present, we program the future to continue the past. Letting go the past in the present, we free the future to be something else.