Andrew Harvey Quotes & Sayings

If you're listening, if you're awake to the poignant beauty of the world, your heart breaks regularly. In fact, your heart is made to break; it's purpose is to burst open again and again so that it can hold ever more wonders. — Andrew Harvey

If you want a television, you go out and work for it and you buy it. If you want to learn about Aztec pottery, you take a course. But the relationship with God requires the active and passionate participation of you, yourself. You have to risk it. You have to abandon yourself to it. You have to leap into the fire. Nobody will do it for you; nobody can do it for you. — Andrew Harvey

We are now, I believe, on the threshold of a third stage which I call the stage of the sacred marriage. This is the only position we could possibly take and still survive. This is a stage beyond both matriarchy and patriarchy. It involves the restoration to human respect of all of the rejected powers of the feminine. But it is absolutely essential that this restoration should be accomplished in the deep spirit of the sacred feminine. Not only should we invoke the sacred feminine, restore the sacred feminine, but this union between the matriarchal and the patriarchal, the sacred marriage, must be accomplished in the spirit of the sacred feminine for it to be real, effective, rich, and fecund. It must occur in her spirit of unconditional love, in her spirit of tolerance, forgiveness, all-embracing and all-harmonizing balance, and not, in any sense, involve a swing in the other direction. — Andrew Harvey

When the passion of the mystic for God is married to the passion of the activist for justice, a new fire is born. — Andrew Harvey

A spirituality that is only private and self-absorbed, one devoid of an authentic political and social consciousness, does little to halt the suicidal juggernaut of history. On the other hand, an activism that is not purified by profound spiritual and psychological self-awareness and rooted in divine truth, wisdom, and compassion will only perpetuate the problem it is trying to solve, however righteous its intentions. When, however, the deepest and most grounded spiritual vision is married to a practical and pragmatic drive to transform all existing political, economic and social institutions, a holy force - the power of wisdom and love in action - is born. This force I define as Sacred Activism. — Andrew Harvey

What we are here to do is to meet and become the person we are. — Andrew Harvey

Knowing her we will know that we are her divine children in a relationship of complete, unconditionally loving intimacy; we will know that nature is holy in all its sacred particulars because it is everywhere vibrant with her light and her love; we will know that we have come to this earth not, as some patriarchal mystical traditions have implied, to escape it but to embrace it fully, not to 'transcend' it but to arrive here in full presence, gratitude and love. — Andrew Harvey

Adoration is not some fervent spiritual or poetic exercise reserved for a chosen few. I believe the human race will die out and destroy nature if it does not learn again how to adore God, the God in all of us, God shining and living in nature, and learn again how to act from and in that spirit of adoration. — Andrew Harvey

It is up to the leader to create a healthy environment where people are not afraid to fail. Mistakes should be seen as an integral part of the organizational process. They are a normal part of striving for excellence. — Andrew Harvey

Unless our fundamental sacred connectedness with every being and thing is experienced deeply and enacted everywhere, religious, political, and other differences will go on creating intolerable conflict that can only increase the already dangerously high chances of our self-annihilation. — Andrew Harvey

Sacred Activism is the fusion of the mystic's passion for God with the activist's passion for justice, creating a third fire, which is the burning sacred heart that longs to help, preserve, and nurture every living thing. — Andrew Harvey

Coming to know the hidden and forgotten Mother and the marvelous wisdom of the sacred feminine as revealed from every side and angle by the different mystical traditions is not luxury; it is, I believe, a necessity for our survival as a species. — Andrew Harvey

To be in a body is to hear the heartbeat of death at every moment. — Andrew Harvey

Nothing that happens on the surface of the sea can alter the calm of its depths — Andrew Harvey

When you wake up to the Divine Consciousness within you and your divine identity, you wake up simultaneously to the Divine Consciousness appearing as all other beings. And this is not poetry and this is not a feeling, this is a direct experience of the divine light living in and as all other beings. And until this realization is firm in you, you do not know who or where you are. — Andrew Harvey

Every single corner and aspect of our lives, every single choice, will be different if we take the invitation of this [Rumi's] poetry to act from the Divine Center of Silence and allow the glory of the Presence to soak our every movement. — Andrew Harvey

I have had the great good fortune of working with a true genius of yoga, Karuna Erickson, in developing a new system called Heart Yoga. — Andrew Harvey

There are no solutions to life, but there is an experience of wholeness, of bliss, of being, of the deathlessness of the Divine Self, of Silence in all its multifacted, diamond splendor that heals all grief, all wounds, all questions. — Andrew Harvey

For Jesus, it is clear, poverty is not the problem; it is the solution. Until human beings learn to live in naked contact and direct simplicity and equality with each other, sharing all resources, there can be no solution to the misery of the human condition and no establishment of God's kingdom. Jesus' radical and paradoxical sense of who could and who could not enter the Kingdom is even more clearly illustrated by his famous praise of children. — Andrew Harvey

The very things we wish to avoid, neglect and flee from turn out to be the 'prima materia' from which all real growth comes. — Andrew Harvey

The Mother's knowledge of unity, her powers of sensitivity, humility, and balance, and her infinite respect for the miracle of all life have now to be invoked by each of us and practiced if the 'masculine' rational imbalance of our civilization is to be righted before its too late. — Andrew Harvey

We are so addicted, either to materialism or to transcending material reality, that we don't see God right in front of us, in the beggar, the starving child, the brokenhearted woman; in our friend; in the cat; in the flea. We miss it, and in missing it, we allow the world to be destroyed. — Andrew Harvey

What a recovery of the wisdom of the Mother brings to all of us is the knowledge of inseparable connection with the entire creation and the wise, active love that is born from that knowledge. — Andrew Harvey

Coming into contact with the Mother is coming into contact with a force of passionate and active compassion in every area and dimension of life, a force that longs to be invoked by us to help transform all the existing conditions of life on earth so that they can mirror ever more clearly and accurately her law, her justice, and her love. — Andrew Harvey

What knowing the Mother means above all is daring to put love into action. The Mother herself is love-in-action, love acting everywhere and in everything to make creation possible. — Andrew Harvey

What breaks your heart, what you really love, is the thing that will sustain you. That's what you ought to be doing. — Andrew Harvey

The future of the world depends on the full restoration of the Sacred Feminine in all its tenderness, passion, divine ferocity, and surrendered persistence. — Andrew Harvey

Competition exists to choose who gets the prize when the prize can't be shared. — Andrew Harvey

Unless the human race realizes with a passion and reverence beyond thought or words its inter-being with nature, it will destroy in its greed the very environment it is itself sustained by. — Andrew Harvey