Rob Brezsny Quotes & Sayings

Proclaim the only truth you can be totally sure of: "I don't know." — Rob Brezsny

We're not going to waste our valuable space or your precious energy by giving equal time to stories of tragedy, failure, and tumult. They get far more that their fair share of attention everywhere else. Future historians might even conclude that our age suffered from a collective obsessive-compulsive disorder: the pathological need to repetitively seek out reasons for how bad life is. — Rob Brezsny

What worn-out shticks are blinding you to the blessings that life is conspiring to give you? — Rob Brezsny

We need radical curiosity and reverent pranks, voracious listening and ferocious thanks. — Rob Brezsny

If you bury your face in your tear-stained pillow and beg God to please send you your soul mate, may you not slur your words in such a way that they sound like "cell mate." — Rob Brezsny

The "Kumulipo" is an old Hawaiian prayer chant that poetically describes the creation of the world. The word literally means "beginning-in-deep-darkness." Here darkness doesn't connote gloom and evil. Rather, it's about the inscrutability of the embryonic state; the obscure chaos that reigns before germination. — Rob Brezsny

Only you can prevent the genocide of the imagination. — Rob Brezsny

All of creation is alive and conscious, and all of creation deserves our burning, churning, yearning love. All of it. Not just the people and creatures and things that we personally find beautiful and helpful and interesting. But everything. All of creation. — Rob Brezsny

God was my co-pilot, but we crashed in the mountains and I had to eat Him. Explain. — Rob Brezsny

Your drive to produce hard-edged opinions stoked by hostility is likely a sign that you've been brainwashed by the pedestrian influences of pop nihilism. — Rob Brezsny

Remember your natural affection for all of creation. — Rob Brezsny

Everyone who believes in the devil is the devil. — Rob Brezsny

The poet Muriel Rukeyser said the universe is composed of stories, not of atoms. The physicist Werner Heisenberg declared that the universe is made of music, not of matter. And we believe that if you habitually expose yourself to toxic stories and music, you could wind up living in the wrong universe, where it's impossible to become the gorgeous genius you were born to be. That's why we implore you to nourish yourself with delicious, nutritious tales and tunes that inspire you to exercise your willpower for your highest good. — Rob Brezsny

Now try these Drivetime talismans on for size: organized chaos ... wild discipline ... reverent blasphemy ... self-effacing grandiosity ... fanatic moderation ... selfish gifts ... twisted calm ... garish elegance ... insane poise ... ironic sincerity ... blasphemous prayers ... orgiastic lucidity ... aggressive sensitivity ... convoluted simplicity ... macho feminism. Homework Discuss what is wetter than water, stronger than love, and more exotic than trust. — Rob Brezsny

The fisherman of the Colombian coast must be learned doctors of ethics and morality, for they invented the word sentipensante, or 'feeling-thinking' to define language that speaks the truth. Eduardo Galeano — Rob Brezsny

Push hard to get better, become smarter, grow your devotion to the truth, fuel your commitment to beauty, refine your emotional intelligence, hone your dreams, negotiate with your shadow, cure your ignorance, shed your pettiness, heighten your drive to look for the best in people, and soften your heart
even as you always accept yourself for exactly who you are with all of your so-called imperfections. — Rob Brezsny

HYPOTHESES: Evil is boring. Cynicism is idiotic. Fear is a bad habit. Despair is lazy. Joy is fascinating. Love is an act of heroic genius. Pleasure is our birthright. Receptivity is a superpower. — Rob Brezsny

Are you apathetic toward the saccharine goodness evangelized by sentimental, superstitious fanatics, but equally bored by the intellectuals who worship at the empty-headed shrine of scientific materialism? — Rob Brezsny

Life always delivers the creative energy you need to change into the new thing you must become. — Rob Brezsny

In its wild state, the truth is fluid, slippery, vagrant, scrambled, promiscuous, kaleidoscopic, and beautiful. — Rob Brezsny

Pronoia is the antidote for paranoia. It's the understanding that the universe is fundamentally friendly. It's a mode of training your senses and intellect so you're able to perceive the fact that life always gives you exactly what you need, exactly when you need it. — Rob Brezsny

BIBLIOBLISS. Transported into states of transcendent pleasure while immersed in reading a favorite book. — Rob Brezsny

The only real voyage consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes; in seeing the universe through the eyes of another, one hundred others-in seeing the hundred universes that each of them sees.
Marcel Proust, translated by Kiyotesong — Rob Brezsny

Your sweet spot is in between the true believers and the scoffing skeptics ... — Rob Brezsny

Love enmeshes you in your partner's unique set of karmic complications, so make sure you're very interested in his or her problems. Love is a laboratory where you can uncover secrets about yourself that have previously been hidden, so be ravenously curious. — Rob Brezsny

Being born on the earth is the highest honor and greatest privilege. To be alive as human beings gives us the chance to pull off exquisite and Herculean feats of magic that are not possible in nirvana or heaven or any other so-called paradise, higher dimension, or better place,being alive right now is the greatest gift i got from God. — Rob Brezsny

The world is crazily in love with you, wildly and innocently in love. Even now, thousands of secret helpers are conspiring to turn you into the beautiful curiosity you were born to be. — Rob Brezsny

Anthropologists say that in every culture in history, children have played the game hide and seek. — Rob Brezsny

Mojo grace means the shocking benevolence of a mysterious force beyond our comprehension. — Rob Brezsny

You're alive because of love. You're made of love. — Rob Brezsny

I vow to interpret every experience as a direct healing of the Goddess with my soul. — Rob Brezsny

The revolution begins at home. If you overthrow yourself again and again, you might earn the right to help overthrow the rest of us. — Rob Brezsny

I'm allergic to dogma. I thrive on riddles. Any idea I believe, I reserve the right to disbelieve as well. — Rob Brezsny

Evil is boring. Cynicism is pointless. Fear is a bad habit. Despair is lazy. Hopelessness is self-indulgent. On the other hand: Joy is fascinating. Love is an act of heroic genius. Pleasure is our birthright. Chronic ecstasy is a learnable skill. — Rob Brezsny

Can you imagine what it would feel like to become aware of an omnipresent ocean of wild divine love that has always been a secret to you in the same way that the sea is invisible to a fish? — Rob Brezsny

Act as if the universe is a prodigious miracle created for your amusement and illumination. Assume that secret helpers are working behind the scenes to assist you in turning into the gorgeous masterpiece you were born to be. Join the conspiracy to shower all of creation with blessings. — Rob Brezsny

I will never again cast a curse on myself. — Rob Brezsny

You will have a growing knack for gravitating toward wilder, wetter, more interesting problems. More and more, you will be drawn to the kind of gain that doesn't requite pain. You'll be so alive and awake that you'll cheerfully push yourself out of your comfort zone in the direction of your personal frontier well before you're forced to do so by divine kicks in the ass. — Rob Brezsny

When they say "Be yourself," which self do they mean? — Rob Brezsny

Don't save your enormous creativity for "something better." Give it to this. — Rob Brezsny

In the New World, you'll kick your own ass and I'll wash my own brain. I'll be my own parents and you'll be you own wife. And vise versa. That'll be normal in the New World - different from the Old World, where everyone except me is to blame for my ignorance and you call on everyone except yourself to give you what you need. I'll push my own buttons and right my own wrongs. You'll wake yourself up and sing your won songs. — Rob Brezsny

It's about time you admitted that you are a miraculous work of art. You came into this world as a radiant bundle of exuberant riddles. You slipped into this dimension as a shimmering burst of spiral hallelujahs. You blasted into this realm as a lush explosion of ecstatic gratitude. And it is your birthright to fulfill those promises. — Rob Brezsny

In the future, judges will send criminals to holy spots where reverence-provoking beauty will overwhelm their addiction to hatred. — Rob Brezsny

We're searching for the answers so we can destroy them and dream up better questions. — Rob Brezsny

BLASPHEMOUS REVERENCE. Acting on the knowledge that the most efficacious form or devotion to the Divine Wow is tinctured with playful or mischievous behavior that prevents the buildup of fanaticism. — Rob Brezsny

You're a star
and so am I. I'm a genius
and so are you.
Your success encourages my brilliance, and my charisma enhances your power.
Your victory doesn't require my defeat, and vice versa. — Rob Brezsny

Most of us can manage no more than a narrow little obsession with a particular human who we mistakenly imagine can satisfy our gargantuan yearning for the real, primordial thing. — Rob Brezsny

The Sun, each second, transforms four million tons of itself into light, giving itself over to become energy that we, with every meal, partake of. For four million years, humans have been feasting on the Sun's energy stored in the form of wheat or reindeer.
Brian Swimme — Rob Brezsny

All of us need to be in touch with a mysterious, tantalizing source of inspiration that teases our sense of wonder and goads us on to life's next adventure. — Rob Brezsny

Not waiting for someone to give you what you can give yourself. — Rob Brezsny

You need to evade every influence that tends to keep you frozen in the past. — Rob Brezsny

Real confidence has no bluster or bombast. It's not rooted in a desire to seem better than everyone else and it's not driven by a fear of appearing weak. Real confidence settles in when you have a clear vision of exactly what you need to do. Real confidence blooms as you wield the skills and power you have built through your hard work and discipline. — Rob Brezsny

Obsessing on evil is boring. Rousing fear is a hackneyed shtick. Wallowing is despair is a bad habit. Indulging in cynicism is akin to committing a copycat crime. — Rob Brezsny

Break open the forbidden happiness. — Rob Brezsny

To be loved is a privilege and prize equivalent to being born. If you're smart, you pause regularly to bask in the astonishing knowledge that there are many people out there who care for you and want you to thrive and hold you in their thoughts with fondness. — Rob Brezsny

Life is a conspiracy to shower you with a nonstop feast of interesting experiences, all of which are designed to help you grow your intelligence, shed your pretensions, and master the art of ingenious love. — Rob Brezsny

Somewhere there's a treasure that has no value to anyone but you, and a secret that's meaningless to everyone except you, and a frontier that harbors a revelation only you would know how to exploit. Why not go in search of those things? — Rob Brezsny

Somewhere in the world there is a person who could ask you the precise question you need to hear in order to catalyze the next phase of your evolution. Do what's necessary to run into that person. — Rob Brezsny

Any media-brainwashed automaton can summon the insipid courage to peer into the horrifying abyss. But it takes a freaking genius with a fearless imagination to peer into the maw of happiness. — Rob Brezsny

Enjoy saying "no!" but don't make it the wellspring of your vitality. Be fueled by blood-red yeses ... — Rob Brezsny

The 11th Commandment: Thou Shalt Not Bore God. The 12th Commandment: Thou Shalt Not Bore Thyself. — Rob Brezsny

You're hungry for the infinite and the infinite is hungry for you. — Rob Brezsny

Your imagination is the single most important asset you possess. Your imagination is your power to create mental pictures of things that don't exist yet and that you want to bring into being. Your imagination is what you use to shape your future. And so in your own way, you are a prophet. You generate countless predictions every day. Your imagination is the source,tirelessly churning out mental pictures of what you'll be doing in the future. — Rob Brezsny

Factual information alone isn't sufficient to guide you through life's labyrinthine tests. You need and deserve regular deliveries of uncanny revelation. One of your inalienable rights as a human being should therefore be to receive a mysteriously useful omen every day of your life. — Rob Brezsny

On you and me and everything, I bestow my ripe blessings and boisterous bliss ... — Rob Brezsny

Do you realize you can actually listen a person's soul into existence? Your fervent interest in the inner life of those you care for can awaken their dormant powers. The teacher Richard Moss says 'The greatest gift you can give another is the purity of your attention.' Offer this gift. — Rob Brezsny

Kaohinani is a Hawaiian word meaning gatherer of beautiful things. — Rob Brezsny

Quoting geneticists, Guy Murcia says we're all family. You have at least a million relatives as close as tenth cousin, and no one on Earth is further removed than your fiftieth cousin. Murcia also describes out kinship though an analysis of how deeply we share the air. With each breath, you take into your body 10 sextillion atoms, and-owing to the wind's ceaseless circulation- over a year's time you have intimate relations with oxygen molecules exhaled by every person alive, as well as everyone who ever lived. (The Seven Mysteries of Life) — Rob Brezsny

May you eat an unfamiliar dessert in a strange land at least once every three years. May you wake up ... and start dancing while you're still half-asleep. May you spray-paint Rilke poems as graffiti on highway overpasses ... My you learn to identify by name 20 flowers, 15 trees, 10 clouds, and one extrasolar planet ... May you dream of taking a trip to the moon in a gondola powered by firecrackers and wild swans. — Rob Brezsny

Imagine that the whole world belongs to you. The birch trees in New Hampshire's White Mountains are yours, and so are the cirrus clouds in the western sky at dusk and the black sand on the beaches of Hawaii's big island.
You own everything, my dear sovereign - the paintings in all the museums of the world, as well as the internet and the wild horses and the roads. Please take good care of it all, OK? Be an enlightened monarch who treats your domain with reverent responsibility. And make sure you also enjoy the full measure of fun that comes with such mastery. Glide through life as if all of creation is yearning to honor and entertain you. — Rob Brezsny

Sadly, many storytellers and artists are still addicted to the old delusions (happy is boring, evil is interesting) about the risks of good mental health. Even those who don't view peace of mind as a threat to their creative power often believe that it's a rare commodity attained through dumb luck ... .It's possible to define a more supple variety of happiness that does not paralyze the will or sap ambition ... .the number one trait of happy people is a serious determination to be happy. Bliss is a habit you can cultivate, in other words, not an accident. — Rob Brezsny

Anger has become one of the trendiest emotions of all. In moderation it can be a righteous force for constructive change. But its hackneyed omnipresence means the vast majority of its outbreaks are trivial. The paucity of colorful obscenities is aggravated by an abundance of frivolous fury. — Rob Brezsny

Your face is true and your hair is perfect and I love you. You make boats in my dreams and you speak without words and I love you. Your fears unnerve me and your questions amuse me and I love you. I love you not only for who you are, but for the interesting person I become when I'm with you. I say I love you and love you and love you until the words become the constant song of your voice in my head and the original ache of memory in my soul. I love you more than life and death, more than everything that's in between the light and the dark. Do you believe me? Try harder. Do you believe me now? I'm always with you, which is why I know you will never abandon yourself. — Rob Brezsny

If you're really listening, if you're awake to the poignant beauty of the world, your heart breaks regularly. In fact, your heart is made to break; its purpose is to burst open again and again so it can hold evermore wonders. -Andrew Harvey — Rob Brezsny

Blow kisses to the oak trees and sparrows and elephants and weeds. — Rob Brezsny

You have to learn how to stay in a good mood as you overthrow the sour, puckered hallucination that is mistakenly referred to as reality. — Rob Brezsny

The average American child sees 20,000 murders in TV before reaching age 18. This is considered normal. Every community has video rental stores filled with multimillion-dollar films that depict people doing terrible things to each other. If you read newspapers, you have every right to believe that Bad Nasty Things compose 90 percent of the human experience. But you will be hard-pressed to find more than a few novels, films, news stories, and TV shows that dare to depict life as a gift whose purpose is to enrich the human soul. — Rob Brezsny

Imagine the people you fear and dislike as pivotal characters in a fascinating and ultimately redemptive plot that will take years or even lifetimes for the Divine to elaborate. — Rob Brezsny

Love isn't as simple as you wish it would be. On the other hand, it's nowhere near as complicated as you fear it is. My advice to you is to extinguish any itch you might have to compel love to serve any agenda whatsoever. Instead, bow down before it with all the innocence you can muster, and declare yourself ready to be its humble student and servant. Celebrate through surrender. — Rob Brezsny

Here's what I say: We will ignore the cult of doom and gloom and embrace the cause of zoom and boom. We will laugh at the stupidity of evil and hate, and summon the brilliance of praise and create ... Life is crazily in love with us-wildly and innocently in love with us. The universe always gives us exactly what we need, exactly when we need it. — Rob Brezsny

Assume that your drive to experience pleasure isn't a barrier to your spiritual growth, but is in fact essential to it. Proceed on the hypothesis that cultivating joy can make you a more ethical and compassionate person. Imagine that feeling good has something important to teach you every day. What might you do differently from what you do now? — Rob Brezsny

Will you have the stamina and inspiration necessary to dream up bigger, better, more original sins and wilder, wetter, more interesting problems? Do you realize how demanding it will be to turn yourself into a wildly disciplined, radically curious, fiercely tender, ironically sincere, ingeniously loving, aggressively sensitive, blasphemously reverent, lustfully compassionate master of rowdy bliss? — Rob Brezsny

Do not steal something that already belongs to you or pine for people who are sitting right next to you. — Rob Brezsny