Quotes & Sayings About Darkness Within Us

I finally realized that it's possible to love within a space that sometimes holds nothing but emptiness.. or nothing but darkness.
After all, we all have darkness within us.
Some of us more than others. — T.M. Frazier

Continually trying to look on the bright side interferes with our finding the wisdom that lies in the fruitful darkness. Continually striving upward toward the light means we never grow downward into our own feet, never become firmly rooted on the earth, never explore the darkness within and around us, a darkness without whose existence the light would have no meaning. — Stephen Harrod Buhner

There is a power now slumbering within us, which is awakened would do to evil what light does to darkness. — Mahatma Gandhi

Darkness scares us. We yearn for the comfort of light as it provides shape and form, allowing us to recognize and define what's before us. But what is it we're afraid of really? Not the darkness itself, but the truth we know hides within. — Emily Thorne

Just then, a singly firefly flashes its light, then another. Within a minute the darkness is filled with fireflies, twinkling their silent melody. I think about all the people in the world, how each of us has a place where we belong. I wonder then what my place looks like. Because I am not there, and I am not sure I have ever seen it. — Dominique Paul

He has a spirit-a soul- and therfore a choice. I will belive that Aurox will chose Light, even if Darkness resides within him. None of us is entirely good. Or evil. — P.C. Cast

No one escapes suffering. Everyone goes through tough times. Suffering is a part of our human condition and cannot be avoided. Setbacks, failures, pain, suffering, and hardships are all a part of life, but whether we are able to find peace within the storm depends on our resilience and perseverance. Whenever one of our children tells us that they don't want to fail at something, we remind them that there will be times in their life when they will fail, but it's how they come through it that matters. If we choose to focus on the negative, the failure itself, the darkness will oppress and consume us. Eventually it will destroy a person. We need to embrace the fact that we're human and our lives will be filled with suffering and hardship, but we have the ultimate hope and victory in Our Lord. — Karen Santorum

War and tooth enameled
salted lemon childhoods
All colors run, none of us solid
Don't look for shadow behind me
I carry it within
I live cycles of light and darkness — Suheir Hammad

We know nothing worth knowing about what goes on outside our frontiers. Worse-we know very little more about what goes on within them. Beyond the light of one's own personal experience-darkness. What are people thinking? What are they feeling? How do they behave? Messages of reassurance or exhortation come through. One reads between the lines. Friends pool their knowledge. But in general we live like animals, in ignorance of the world around us. — Michael Frayn

Darkness attracted him as much as light. He knew that these days turning out the light before making love was considered laughable, and so he always left a small lamp burning over the bed. At the momemnt he penetrated sabina, however, he closed his eyes. The pleasure suffusing his body called for darkness. The darkness was pure, perfect, thoughtless, vision less; that darkness was without end, without borders; that darkness was the infinite we each carry within us. — Milan Kundera

In overlooking, denying, evading this complexity
which is nothing more than the disquieting complexity of ourselves
we are diminished and we perish; only within this web of ambiguity, paradox, this hunger, danger, darkness, can we find at once ourselves and the power that will free us from ourselves. It is this power of revelation that is the business of the novelist, this journey toward a more vast reality which must take precedence over other claims. — James Baldwin

The truth is, Rosemary, that you are capable of anything. Good or bad. You always have been, and you always will be. Given the right push, you, too, could do horrible things. That darkness exists within all of us. You think every soldier who picked up a cutter gun was a bad person? No. She was just doing what the soldier next to her was doing, who was doing what the soldier next to her was doing, and so on and so on. And I bet most of them - not all, but most - who made it through the war spent a long time after trying to understand what they'd done. Wondering how they ever could have done it in the first place. Wondering when killing became so comfortable. — Becky Chambers

All great people of history, all the heroes and leaders and innovators who lit humanity's way out of darkness and ignorance, forged within themselves the courage to overcome their internal conflicts when it mattered most. In many ways, they are just like us: They worried. They procrastinated. They sometimes had lower opinions of their fellow human beings. But what made them celebrated, what pushed society forward, what gave birth to their legend, was their sheer will to overcome such impulses and to faithfully, actively, and lovingly fight for a better life for themselves and others. Let us learn from them, let us master ourselves, and let us now add our own chapter of courage to the good book of humanity. — Brendon Burchard

He is within and without: He lives in the live and the lifeless: Subtle beyond mind's grasp; so near to us, so utterly distant: Undivided, He seems to divide into objects and creatures; Send creation forth from Himself, He upholds and withdraws it; Light of all lights, He abides beyond our ignorant darkness; Knowledge, the one thing real we may study or know, the heart's dweller. — Swami Prabhavananda

The Apple Orchard
Come let us watch the sun go down
and walk in twilight through the orchard's green.
Does it not seem as if we had for long
collected, saved and harbored within us
old memories? To find releases and seek
new hopes, remembering half-forgotten joys,
mingled with darkness coming from within,
as we randomly voice our thoughts aloud
wandering beneath these harvest-laden trees
reminiscent of Durer woodcuts, branches
which, bent under the fully ripened fruit,
wait patiently, trying to outlast, to
serve another season's hundred days of toil,
straining, uncomplaining, by not breaking
but succeeding, even though the burden
should at times seem almost past endurance.
Not to falter! Not to be found wanting!

Thus must it be, when willingly you strive
throughout a long and uncomplaining life,
committed to one goal: to give yourself!
And silently to grow and to bear fruit. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Perhaps we were, all of us -pimps, whores, racketeers, church members, and children -bound together by the nature of our oppression, the specific and peculiar complex of risks we had to run; if so, within these limits we sometimes achieved with each other a freedom that was close to love. I remember, anyway, church suppers and outing, and later, after I left the church, rent and waistline parties where rage and sorrow sat in the darkness and did not stir, and we ate and drank and talked and laughed and danced and forgot all about "the man." We had the liquor, we had the chicken, the music, and each other, and had no need to pretend to be what we were not, This is the freedom that one hears in some gospel songs, for example, and in jazz. — James Baldwin

I have a real issue with anyone trying to protect children from their own imaginations. If we cannot acknowledge that a lot of us have a bit of darkness within ourselves, some more than others perhaps, and bring it into the light and examine it and talk about this part of the human condition, then I think we will be living in quite a dangerous climate. I think that's much more damaging for children. — J.K. Rowling

Shadowy material resides inside each one of us, but the man who is willing to face his own capacity for darkness will discover his deepest inner goodness and the presence of the divine within him. Some men never discover the divine presence within because they can't bring themselves to face their demons. Don't try to engineer this process or manufacture any angels. It will be done to you; just do not hate or fear the falling. — Richard Rohr

In the midst of demotion, our hearts are laid bare before us, and we see grime, chaff, and darkness rise up in what we thought were our pure and dedicated hearts. What we often overlook is the fact that being demoted did not cause sinfulness to arise in our hearts; it simply revealed what was brewing within. The Lord will often use seasons of demotion to bring to our attention what has been before His eyes all along. To the sincere heart, this is a priceless gift. — Anna Blanc

My grandmother once told my mother that there is a splice of quartz inside each of us, like the quartz inside a compass or clock. We feel the stone glow warm when we find what it is we are meant to do. My grandmother was a singer; voice was her quartz, a second heartbeat that reminded her always of who she was. My mother's quartz is dance and Joaquin's is the piano. The saddest souls in the world, my mother believes, are those who never discover this thing within them. There is a difference between those who wander in search of that glow and those who wander in hopes of evading it. It is frightening, after all - that first awakening when the radiance within threatens to topple you. Even more terrifying is the decision to allow the fire to continue smoldering, because the brighter you let it get, the more terrible the darkness should you ever let it out."

- Elizabeth Genovise "Irises" (O. Henry prize winner 2016) — Elizabeth Genovise

All these half-tones of the soul's consciousness create a raw landscape within us, a sun eternally setting on what we are. Our sense of ourselves then becomes a deserted field at nightfall, with sad reeds flanking a boatless river, bright in the darkness growing between the distant shores. — Fernando Pessoa

We need to have greater patience with our sense of inner contradiction in order to allow its different dimensions to come into conversation within us. There is a secret light and vital energy in contradiction. Where is energy, there is life and growth. Your contemplative solitude will allow your contradictions to emerge with clarity and force. If you remain faithful to this energy, you will gradually come to participate in a harmony that lies deeper than any contradiction. This will give you new courage to engage the depth, danger, and darkness of your life. — John O'Donohue

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, 'Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?' Actually, who are you not to be? 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 around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others. — Marianne Williamson

Maybe Christ was promoting Buddhism, maybe Buddha wasn't a prophet, maybe the Quran is older than its Prophet, and maybe we shouldn't spend another two thousand years living a lie, just because we fear the truth and the darkness it reveals within us. — Daniel Marques

I've begun to wonder if that's all we really need. Just one person who knows us truly. One person who knows the darkness that lies within and believes in us anyway. — Michelle Zink

Within our twenty-first century modes of communication, truth can be easily manipulated and framed to get the viewer of the information to receive it in a predetermined way, to elicit a desired spin of "truth." Turning on the light doesn't guarantee the clarifying of confusion anymore. If all of the media of our societal experience make us believe that a rope is a snake, then a rope becomes a snake, either in darkness or the light of day. — Ethan Nichtern

The scriptures bid us to send forth our light and our truth and when children carry within their hearts the torch of hope, they learn the darkness yields not only to man-made fire, but to starlight, to the rising sun, and to the light of the soul. — Dennis Kucinich

Darkness dwells within even the best of us. In the worst of us, darkness not only dwells but reins. — Dean Koontz

The light and darkness lives within us all. Which one dominates your soul? — Yvonne Nicolas

God created us in joy and created us for joy, and in the long run not all the darkness there is in the world and in ourselves can separate us finally from that joy, because whatever else it means to say that God created us in His image, I think it means that even when we cannot believe in Him, even when we feel most spiritually bankrupt and deserted by Him, His mark is deep within us. We have God's joy in our blood. — Frederick Buechner

Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness. It strikes us when we walk through the dark valley of a meaningless and empty life. It strikes us when our disgust for our own being, our indifference, our weakness, our hostility, and our lack of direction and composure have become intolerable to us. It strikes us when, year after year, the longed-for perfection of life does not appear, when the old compulsions reign within us as they have for decades, when despair destroys all joy and courage. Sometimes at that moment a wave of light breaks into our darkness, and it is as though a voice were saying: You are accepted. — Paul Tillich

Our self-identification changes with our environment, but sometimes those dark thoughts permeate within us and there are those who are able to fight off those thoughts and others who don't want to fight them, or have just given in for whatever reason and whether they know the darkness they act upon is wrong, they love the darkness. — Matthew Carter

In this world, darkness is always looming on the horizon. At Gottfried, instead of avoiding the dark, we meet it head on ...
do the same with your studies and with every obstacle you face in the future. Do not accept the confines of the world as you perceive it.
Instead, look for what you cannot see. There are universes among us, within us. Our only way out of darkness is to learn how to see WITHOUT light. — Yvonne Woon

People deal with their shadow side in a number of ways, the most common way being to find outside enemies and point to them, demonizing them and blaming them for long lists of perceived evils. This strategy often does a very effective job of helping us avoid that which lurks within us. Politicians and radio talk-show hosts and pastors can become very skilled in this, constantly pointing out the darkness and evil and twisted ways of others to avoid dealing with the doubts and insecurities and questions they bear in their own bones. — Rob Bell

From my point of view, God is the light that illuminates the darkness, even if it does not dissolve it, and a spark of divine light is within each of us. — Pope Francis

The only way to fight the darkness around us is to light a fire within us. — Seth Adam Smith

What interests me is the sense of the darkness that we carry within us, the darkness that's akin to one of the principal subjects of the sublime - terror. — Anish Kapoor

As Hamlet said to Ophelia, "God has given you one face, and you make yourself another." The battle between these two halves of identity...Who we are and who we pretend to be, is unwinnable. "Just as there are two sides to every story, there are two sides to every person. One that we reveal to the world and another we keep hidden inside. A duality governed by the balance of light and darkness, within each of us is the capacity for both good and evil. But those who are able to blur the moral dividing line hold the true power. — Emily Thorne

Strange how close the darkness is, even when things seem brightest. Even in the glare of a summer noon, when the sidewalk bakes and iron fences are hot to the touch, the shadows are still with us. They congregate in doorways and porches, and under bridges, and beneath the brims of gentlemen's hats so you cannot see their eyes. There is darkness in our mouths and ears; in our bags and wallets; within the swing of men's jackets and beneath the flare of women's skirts. We carry it around with us, the dark, and its influence stains us deep. — Jonathan Stroud

There's nothing we fear more than our own Reflection. We scream at the monsters within us, hidden deep within our hearts. We run and hide from the terrors all around us- the different mirrors that we see. — Solange Nicole

Forgotten tones of love recur to us, and kind glances shine out of the past
oh so bright and clear!
oh so longed after!
because they are out of reach; as holiday music from within a prison wall
or sunshine seen through the bars; more prized because unattainable
more bright because of the contrast of present darkness and solitude, whence there is no escape. — William Makepeace Thackeray

The depths of winter longing are ice within my heart
The shards of broken covenants lie sharp against my soul
The wraiths of long-lost ecstasy still keep us two apart
The amen winds of bitterness sill keen from turn to pole.
The scares are twisted tendons, the stumps of struck-off limbs,
The aching pit of hunger and throb of unset bone,
My sanded burning eyeballs, as might within them dims,
Add nothin to the torment of lying here alone ...
The shimmering flames of fever trace out your blessed face
My broken eardrums echo yet your voice inside my head
I do not fear the darkness that comes to me apace
I only dread the loss of you thy comes when I am dead. — Robert A. Heinlein

Our power knows no limits, yet we cannot find food for a starving child, or a home for a refugee. Our knowledge is without measure and we build the weapons that will destroy us. We live on the edge of ourselves, terrified of the darkness within. We have harmed, corrupted and ruined, we have made mistakes and deceived. — John Le Carre

People are complicated creatures. On the one hand, capable of great acts of charity, and on the other, capable of the most underhanded forms of betrayal. It's a constant battle that rages within all of us, between the better angels of our nature and the temptations of our inner demons. And sometimes, the only way to ward off the darkness is to shine the light of compassion. — Mary Alice

But again and again, we should reflect back to the darkness of the cocoon. In order to inspire ourselves forward, we must look back to see the contrast with the place we came from. You see, we cannot reject the world of the cocoon - which out which we may create a new cocoon. When we see the suffering that occured in the old cocoon, that inspires us to go forward in our journey of warriorship. It is a journey that is unfolding within us. — Chogyam Trungpa

These places of possibility within ourselves are dark because they are ancient and hidden; they have survived and grown strong through that darkness. Within these deep places, each one of us holds an incredible reserve of creativity and power, of unexamined and unrecorded emotion and feeling. The woman's place of power within each of us is neither white nor surface; it is dark, it is ancient, and it is deep. — Audre Lorde

He who never looks up to a living God, to a heavenly presence, loses the power of perceiving that presence, and the universe slowly turns into a dead machine, clashing and grinding on, without purpose or end. If the light within us be darkness, how great is that darkness! — James Freeman Clarke

If all the darkness each of us carries within us, all our angers and unhappiness and bad moments were pulled out of us and given shape, we would all create monsters. — Charles De Lint

Tragedy's language stresses that whatever is within us is obscure, many faceted, impossible to see. Performance gave this question of what is within a physical force. The spectators were far away from the performers, on that hill above the theatre. At the centre of their vision was a small hut, into which they could not see. The physical action presented to their attention was violent but mostly unseen. They inferred it, as they inferred inner movement, from words spoken by figures whose entrances and exits into and out of the visible space patterned the play. They saw its results when that facade opened to reveal a dead body. This genre, with its dialectics of seen and unseen, inside and outside, exit and entrance, was a simultaneously internal and external, intellectual and somatic expression of contemporary questions about the inward sources of harm, knowledge, power, and darkness. — Ruth Padel

The light within us can always identify our mind's darkness — Munia Khan

In the shadows, we all are the same. Dark, inconsistent and indifferent. And if someone loves you dark, he loves all of you. Because when it is dark, the shadow is within you. It is the light that differentiates us with an identity. It is the light that marks our shadows.
Light never guarantees love. — Nishikant

But what if I should discover that the least among them all, the poorest of all beggars, the most impudent of all offenders, yea the very fiend himself - that these are within me, and that I myself stand in need of my own kindness, that I myself am the enemy who must be loved - what then? Then, as a rule, the whole truth of Christianity is reversed: there is no more talk of love and long-suffering; we say to the brother within us, "Raca," and condemn and rage against ourselves. We hide him from the world; we deny ever having met this least among the lowly in ourselves, and had it been God himself who drew near to us in this despicable form, we should have denied him a thousand times before a single cock had crowed. — C. G. Jung

Fear is a prison. A feeling of crippling power that spreads darkness within. It blinds. It questions. It takes over every decision we make, coloring it with doubt. Fear, for most of us, rules our lives, and it's only when you conquer it that you can truly live your life to the fullest. — Mia Asher

Our paths are all different and unique. Embrace your space and also cherish and support the dreams and goals of those around you. Someone around you might not have complete clarity of their own path. Remind people of how special and unique they are and that they are enough, worthy and exactly where they need to be right now. Choose Love and Peace, Joy and Light and apply it to your life. Trying to force the future or control the future comes from fear and darkness within us. Trust. — Elizabeth Hamilton-Guarino

Even in the darkest and most cruel person, there is still a kernel of good. And within the most perfect champion, there is darkness. The question is, will one give in to the dark or the light? It's something we decide with every choice we make, every day that we exist. What might not be evil to you could be evil to someone else. Knowing this makes us powerful even without magic. — Morgan Rhodes

The ego is our pain, but it is what we know and we resist moving out of it. The effort it takes to grow out of painful patterns often feels more uncomfortable than remaining within them. Personal growth can be so painful because it can make us ashamed and humiliated to face our own darkness. But the goal of personal growth is the journey out of dark emotional patterns which cause us pain to those which cause us peace. — Marianne Williamson

What makes night within us may leave stars. — Victor Hugo

1:52-53
THE NIGHT VIGIL

Darkness has been given a nightshirt to sleep in (25:47). Remember how human beings were composed from water and dust for blood and flesh with oily resins heated in fire to make a skeleton. Then the soul, the divine light, was breathed into human shapes. The work now is to help our bodies become pure light. It may look like this is not happening. But in a cocoon every bit of worm-dissolving slime becomes silk. As we take in light, each part of us turns to silk.

We made the night a darkness, but we bring shining dawnlight out of that. In the same way the mound of your grave will bloom with resurrection. Sufis and those on the path of the heart use darkness to go within. During the night vigil the universe is theirs (40:16). With all the kings and sultans and their learned counselors asleep, everyone is unemployed, except those wakeful few and the divine presence. — Bahauddin

Destiny's Gate is filled with darkness and light. If you identify with the darkness, this is a good sign as we all have to embrace the darkness within us in order to heal and be brought into the Light as One. — Lee Bice-Matheson

The world of the grotesque is the darkness within us. Well before Freud and Jung shined a light on the workings of the subconscious, this correlation between darkness and our subconscious, these two forms of darkness, was obvious to people. It wasn't a metaphor, even. If you trace it back further, it wasn't even a correlation. Until Edison invented the electric light, most of the world was totally covered in darkness. The physical darkness outside and the inner darkness of the soul were mixed together, with no boundary separating the two. They were directly linked. Like this." Oshima brings his two hands together tightly. "But today things are different. The darkness in the outside world has vanished, but the darkness in our hearts remains, virtually unchanged. Just like an iceberg, what we label the ego or consciousness is, for the most part, sunk in darkness. And that estrangement sometimes creates a deep contradiction or confusion within us. — Haruki Murakami

I see the eight of us within our "Secret Annex" as if we were a little piece of blue heaven, surrounded by black, black rain clouds. The round, clearly defined spot where we stand is still safe, but the clouds gather more closely about us and the circle which separates us from the approaching dangers closes more and more tightly. Now we are so surrounded by danger and darkness that we bump against each other, as we search desperately for a means of escape. We all look down below, where people are fighting each other, we look above, where it is quiet and beautiful, and meanwhile we are cut off by the great dark mass. — Francine Prose

There is no amount of darkness that can extinguish the inner light. The important thing is not to spend our lives trying to control the environment around us. The task is to control the environment within us. — Joan D. Chittister