Marianne Williamson Quotes

I don't feel there is any spiritual or metaphysical justification for turning our backs on human suffering.

You are a child of God, small games do not work in this world. For those around us to feel peace, it is not example to make ourselves small. We were born to express the glory of God that lives in us. It is not in some of us, it is in all of us. While we allow our light to shine, we unconsciously give permission for others to do the same. When we liberate ourselves from our own fears, simply our presence may liberate others.

The universe takes us as seriously as we take it.

Liberation also means that even though I'm a woman I have masculine parts of my temperament which I can safely explore and integrate into my experience.

Within the miraculous brew of universal creativity , all you desire already exists. Spend five minutes each morning with your eyes closed, living in that dimension. Allow images to unfold without censor. Feel yourself living the most magnificent life -- a life of joy, creativity and love -- as you grow inwardly into the person you need to be in order to manifest it effortlessly.

There is no way that carrying fifty or sixty extra pounds is easy on your heart, your lungs, or your liver. That's a fact. Every person in the world, no matter what size, shape, or form they are, deserves respect and love. But that doesn't mean we are supposed to pretend that something is healthy when in fact it is not.

Your life has purpose as long as you dedicate it to love. It's not what we do but who we are that forms our biggest contribution.

Taking the time to meditate is as important as taking the time to breathe. One pumps oxygen into the body, the other pumps peace into the mind.

Governments move armies, but only individuals can move hearts. And with every act of love that emanates from any of us, we are activating miracles, adding to a spiritual ocean that in time will purify our planet of all vestiges of fear. Love alone can triumph over hate, and if we give it the chance, it will.

Fear is trusting in your own power.

Trying to suppress or eradicate symptoms on the physical level can be extremely important, but there's more to healing than that; dealing with psychological, emotional and spiritual issues involved in treating sickness is equally important.

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.

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.

I have lived enough to know great things will unfold for me externally only if I allow them to unfold for me internally.

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

Our self-perception determines our behavior. If we think we’re small, limited, inadequate creatures, then we tend to behave that way, and the energy we radiate reflects those thoughts no matter what we do. If we think we’re magnificent creatures with an infinite abundance of love and power to give, then we tend to behave that way. Once again, the energy around us reflects our state of awareness.

We can always choose to perceive things differently. You can focus on what's wrong in your life, or you can focus on what's right.

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

Spiritual progress is like a detoxification.

We are dominated on this planet by a fear-based rather than a love-based thought system.

Spiritual progress is like detoxification. Things have to come up in order to be released. Once we have asked to be healed, then our unhealed places are forced to the surface.

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.

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.

To me, hope is a moral imperative. I have hope and faith in forces unseen.

Love in your mind produces love in your life. This is the meaning of Heaven. Fear in your mind produces fear in your life. This is the meaning of hell.

Faith is believing that the universe is on our side, and that the universe knows what it's doing. Faith is a psychological awareness of an unfolding force for good, constantly at work in all dimensions. Our attempts to direct this force only interferes with it. Our willingness to relax into it allows it to work on our behalf.

The plan of spiritual evolution is marked not only by God's will that we move ever in the direction of love, nut also by another of God's creative principles: that humanity has free will. What that means is that in any given moment, it is our choice whether we move toward love or retreat from it. What is not love is fear. But in the larger scheme of things, there is a limit past which lovelessness cannot remain. Fear is not life-giving enough to sustain itself. We can move in the direction of fear only so long before it brings us to our knees, or to our end.

Sometimes you are lifted up to the mountaintop as a gift from the universe, so you can see what is possible. Then you are put down back at the bottom: Now you have to earn it for yourself.

Those among us who have achieved the most have achieved only a fraction of what ALL of us are capable of. You haven't even begun to scratch the surface!

Relationships are our primary teacher. They are the context in which we either grow into God consciousness, or deny ourselves and others the opportunity to do so.

The Light in you is the unalterable truth of who you are. You can deny it and obscure it, but you cannot uncreate it.

The challenges we face in life are always lessons that serve our soul's growth.

The world is healed one loving thought at a time.

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.

Our prayer is not simply, ‘Dear God, please send me a better job,’ but, ‘Dear God, enable me to see this situation differently, that this area of apparent lack might be healed inside my mind.

We think we need to create ourselves, always doing a paste-up job on our personalities. That is because we're trying to be special rather than real. We're pathetically trying to conform with all the other people trying to do the same.

A holy relationship is where the brokenness and wounds of the world are not escaped so much as as transformed by love, not hidden from but risen above.

We can invoke spiritual compensation when we find ourselves in situations of material lack. In other words, what happens for most of us is that we are tempted and we are taught, we are trained as it were, to meet limited circumstances with limited thought.

The famous passage from her book is often erroneously attributed to the inaugural address of Nelson Mandela. About the misattribution Williamson said, "Several years ago, this paragraph from A Return to Love began popping up everywhere, attributed to Nelson Mandela's 1994 inaugural address. As honored as I would be had President Mandela quoted my words, indeed he did not. I have no idea where that story came from, but I am gratified that the paragraph has come to mean so much to so many people.

If our prayer is “Dear God, please use me to be of service,” then that is what we will be. And it is not for us to judge either the size or value of our gifts. Our job is to try to get out of the way, to defer to the spirit moving within us and become open channels for the flow of God’s love.

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

No conventional therapy can release us from a deep and abiding psychic pain. Through prayer we find what we cannot find elsewhere: a peace that is not of this world.

People involved in the inner journey discover the value of the feminine, the spiritually receptive and inclusive aspect of human consciousness.

Calling something "new age" is one of the media's biggest canons. If you're called "new age," you couldn't possibly be serious, you couldn't possibly have anything deep to say, and you probably hang out in California too much - and we know that no one in California reads books or has any serious thoughts!

Relationships never end, because they're of the mind; only bodies can separate. When you're missing someone, know it just means that on a soul level they've come to visit.

Love is within us. It cannot be destroyed, but can only be hidden

A miracle is a shift in perception from fear to love-from a belief in what is not real, to faith in that which is. That shift in perception changes everything.

...available people are the ones who are dangerous, because they confront us with the possibility of real intimacy.