Famous Quotes & Sayings

Sara Maitland Quotes & Sayings

Enjoy the top 23 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Sara Maitland.

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Famous Quotes By Sara Maitland

Sara Maitland Quotes 1096424

You are one of those courageous people who want to dare to live; and to do so believe you have to explore the depths of yourself, undistracted and unprotected by social conventions and norms. — Sara Maitland

Sara Maitland Quotes 1848089

I believe that the great stretches of forests in northern Europe, with their constant seasonal changes, their restricted views, their astonish biological diversity, their secret gifts and perils and the knowledge that you have to go through them to get anywhere else, created the themes and ethics of the fairy tales we know best. There are secrets, hidden identities, cunning disguises; there are rhythms of change like the changes of the seasons; there are characters, both human and animal, whose assistance can be earned or spurned; and there is
over and over again
the journey or quest, which leads first to knowledge and then to happiness. The forest is the place of trial in fairy stories, both dangerous and exciting. Coming to terms with the forest, surviving its terrors, utilising its gifts and gaining its help is the way to 'happy ever after. — Sara Maitland

Sara Maitland Quotes 344331

In fact they were initially sublimely indifferent to politics altogether, since they believed the world was going to end soon and that what mattered was preparing oneself for the immediate return of the Lord Jesus and an apocalyptic final judgement. Their core values focused around a personal (interior) relationship with God and holiness, — Sara Maitland

Sara Maitland Quotes 1156478

The fear-and-projection strategy will turn round and bite back: you will be the sad, mad, bad person, and this can only make a difficult situation very much worse. Additionally, since - as you will see - there is a good deal of evidence that none of these worries are actually true, people pursuing this route will be obliged to cut themselves off from many ways of knowing about the actual world in which they are living. This itself may well prove isolating: one of the problems with projected fears is that they do tend to make the scary thing or event more likely, rather than less likely, to occur. — Sara Maitland

Sara Maitland Quotes 75734

Now fairy stories are at risk too, like the forests. Padraic Column has suggested that artificial lighting dealt them a mortal wound: when people could read and be productive after dark, something fundamental changed, and there was no longer need or space for the ancient oral tradition. The stories were often confined to books, which makes the text static, and they were handed over to children. — Sara Maitland

Sara Maitland Quotes 2267025

Another of the things I started to do during this time was what Buddhists normally call "meditation" or, in Christian terms, "contemplative prayer". It began to supersede deipnosophy as my favorite hobby. — Sara Maitland

Sara Maitland Quotes 2200132

Solitude is escapist. People who like being alone are running away from 'reality', refusing to make the effort to 'commit' to real life and live instead in a half-dream fantasy world. They should 'man up', get real, get a grip. But if social life is so natural, healthy and joyous as contemporary society insists, why would anyone be 'escaping' from it?
Solitude is antisocial. Well of course it is - that's the point. This argument is tautological. But 'antisocial' is a term that carries implicit rather than explicit moral condemnation; it is clearly a 'bad thing' without it being at all clear what it might mean. All this actually says is 'solitude is preferring to be alone rather than with others/me [the speaker] and I am hurt.' It is true, but is based on the assumption that being alone is self-evidently a bad thing, and being social is equally self-evidently a good thing. — Sara Maitland

Sara Maitland Quotes 2112038

Ian Watson did an almost full novel length treatment which I've never seen and when he finished it Stanley said to him. I need somebody to smear this with vaginal jelly, and I have to say when I first heard this that I was rather shocked, because he was quite gentlemanly. — Sara Maitland

Sara Maitland Quotes 2071673

Running alone can allow you to hit the mute button on the world ... and take full advantage of exercise's stress-busting benefits. 'Running alone can be a meditative experience where you get to really think and concentrate or completely clear your mind and zone out,' a psychotherapist Michelle Maidenberg says, ... 'You have to practise letting go of the inner chatter that can get in the way of what you want to accomplish,' sports psychologist Cindra Kamphoff says, 'And that's something you have to do on your own. — Sara Maitland

Sara Maitland Quotes 1783431

Forests to the [early] Northern European peoples were dangerous and generous, domestic and wild, beautiful and terrible. And the forests were the terrain out of which fairy stories, one of our earliest and most vital cultural forms, evolved. The mysterious secrets and silences, gifts and perils of the forest are both the background to and source of these tales ...
Forests are places where a person can get lost and also hide
and losing and hiding, of things and people, are central to European fairy stories in ways that are not true of similar stories in different geographies. Landscape informs the collective imagination as much as or more than it forms the individual psyche and its imagination, but this dimension is not something to which we always pay enough attention. — Sara Maitland

Sara Maitland Quotes 1397327

It is not simply that we share with each other a common humanity, but that individually we have no humanity without each other. — Sara Maitland

Sara Maitland Quotes 1393568

My father taught me to be independent and cocky and free thinking, but he could not stand it if I disagreed with him. — Sara Maitland

Sara Maitland Quotes 1123141

Of course we also live in a world of great beauty, sacrificial and passionate love, tenderness, prosperity, courage and joy. But quite a lot of all that seems to happen regardless of the paradigm and the high thoughts of philosophy. It has always happened. It is precisely because it has always happened that we go on wrestling with these issues in the hope that it can happen more often and for more people. — Sara Maitland

Sara Maitland Quotes 1106262

You can have a failed quest, but you can't have an achieved quest and no reward. — Sara Maitland

Sara Maitland Quotes 1063759

Wilberforce did not believe in either evolution or extinction.
Owen believed in extinction but not evolution.
Lamarck believed in evolution but not extinction.
Darwin believed in evolution and extinction.
All four of them believed in God. — Sara Maitland

Sara Maitland Quotes 1057465

Gardening gave me a way to work with silence; not "in silence" but "with silence" - it was a silent creativity. — Sara Maitland

Sara Maitland Quotes 674173

[Georg Cantor was the first to prove that there could be a series of infinities; that infinities come in an infinite number of sizes.] Thus Cantor's Absolute is a perfect image for what we experience of God. When I speak of a Big Enough God I am not merely thinking of an Infinite God, but the God of infinities, the Absolute, which either chooses to reveal itself or remains veiled in mystery. Modern mathematics does begin to feel like the language that God talks. — Sara Maitland

Sara Maitland Quotes 593108

Art forms render ideas accessible to readers who could not receive those insights in any other format. — Sara Maitland

Sara Maitland Quotes 496954

Art is an artificial organization of experience ... — Sara Maitland

Sara Maitland Quotes 317331

We think we are unique, special and deserving of happiness, but we are terrified of being alone. — Sara Maitland

Sara Maitland Quotes 305579

there is an interior dimension to silence, a sort of stillness of heart and mind which is not a void but a rich space. — Sara Maitland

Sara Maitland Quotes 150733

Being alone in our present society raises an important question about identity and well-being. — Sara Maitland

Sara Maitland Quotes 112886

If you tell people enough times that they are unhappy, incomplete, possibly insane and definitely selfish there is bound to come a grey morning when they wake up with the beginning of a nasty cold and wonder if they are lonely rather than simply "alone." — Sara Maitland