Eisenstein Quotes & Sayings

It was hard to imagine the icy water thawed and re-sealing, or the sky returning to a lively blue. She had a sense of contraction, of huddling against the weather. Later, it figured in her mind as Stalinist classicism, the wind tunnel of the vast and inhuman Karl-Marx-Allee, and the shapes of people in padded jackets bending against the cruel air. A scene from Eisenstein, perhaps, with a gelid lens and the special effects of monumental vision, swollen by an aerial view and historical misery. Black outlines on white snow, impersonality, extinguishment. Exaggeration of this kind was irresistible. In that early, fierce cold, Berliners coped better. — Gail Jones

The things we think we want are often substitutes for what we really want, and the pleasures we seek are less than the joy that they distract us from. — Charles Eisenstein

We each have unique gifts that draw us toward the work for which those gifts are best suited. Although a healthy, well-rounded person will generally engage the world on multiple levels, being as she is an individual, a friend, a member of a family, a member of a community and a place, an inhabitant of a bioregion, a citizen of a nation, and a member of the tribe of all life on Earth, even a cosmic citizen, it is also true that we go through phases of relative inward and outward focus, action, and quiet, expression and retreat. — Charles Eisenstein

Let me repeat that: Our civilization is constitutionally incapable of reversing the annihilation of natural capital, or even slowing it down. Get used to that. When we really understand that, the project of reconceiving civilization itself will gain powerful impetus. — Charles Eisenstein

How do we change the world? Change the story. — Charles Eisenstein

And so the second answer: you are everything. Take away even the tiniest relationship and you are diminished as well; add one and you are increased; change any being in this cosmos, and you are altered as well. You are, therefore, everything: a web of relationship, each containing all. — Charles Eisenstein

These include the need to express one's gifts and do meaningful work, the need to love and be loved, the need to be truly seen and heard, and to see and hear other people, the need for connection to nature, the need to play, explore, and have adventures, the need for emotional intimacy, the need to serve something larger than oneself, and the need sometimes to do absolutely nothing and just be. — Charles Eisenstein

The logic is backwards. Genius is the result of doing what you love, not a prerequisite for it. — Charles Eisenstein

We have to appeal to what moves us: the love of our beautiful planet. — Charles Eisenstein

Hwang's peacefulness had rendered him incapable of violence. For this to "work," though, the peacefulness must be genuine and deep. The smile must be real. The love must be real. If there is an intent to manipulate, to show the other up, to highlight the brutality by contrasting it with one's own nonviolence, then the power of the smile and the hug is much less strong. — Charles Eisenstein

McMansions in sprawling suburbs, without mountains of unnecessary packaging, without giant mechanized monofarms, without energy-hogging big-box stores, without electronic billboards, without endless piles of throwaway junk, without the overconsumption of consumer goods no one really needs is not an impoverished world. I disagree with those environmentalists who say we are going to have to make do with less. In fact, we are going to make do with more: more beauty, more community, more fulfillment, more art, more music, and material objects that are fewer in number but superior in utility and aesthetics. The cheap stuff that fills our lives today, however great its quantity, can only cheapen life. — Charles Eisenstein

Maintaining focus on the breath cannot happen through forcing, but only through allowing. In fact, it is extremely easy; our habit of making things hard is what gets in the way. — Charles Eisenstein

The intuitions developed over centuries will be true no longer. No longer will greed, scarcity, the quantification and commoditization of all things, the "time preference" for immediate consumption, the discounting of the future for the sake of the present, the fundamental opposition between financial interest and the common good, or the equation of security with accumulation be axiomatic. — Charles Eisenstein

Or could it be, rather, that we have made it bleak: obscured its vibrant mystery with our ideological blinders, severed its infinite connectedness with our categories, suppressed its spontaneous order with our pavement, reduced its infinite variety with our commodities, shattered its eternity with our time-keeping, and denied its abundance with our money system? If so, — Charles Eisenstein

Each experience of love nudges us toward the Story of Interbeing, because it only fits into that story and defies the logic of Separation. — Charles Eisenstein

Time is life. When we experience time as scarce, we experience life as short and poor. — Charles Eisenstein

Real change doesn't come without crisis. Childbirth doesn't come without crisis. I think that's happening with humanity now. Our growth has generated multiple crises ... and these are the contractions that are propelling us into a new world, whether we like it or not, but I think we're going to like it. — Charles Eisenstein

When any of us meet someone who rejects dominant norms and values, we feel a little less crazy for doing the same. Any act of rebellion or non-participation, even on a very small scale, is therefore a political act. — Charles Eisenstein

Being correspondent of a Left paper with a name like Eisenstein deprived one of one's chance of usefulness. Besides — Ford Madox Ford

A revolution that leaves our conceptualization of self and world intact cannot bring other than temporary, superficial change. Only a much deeper revolution, a reconceiving of who we are, can reverse the crises of our age. — Charles Eisenstein

Our peaceful hearts change the situation, disrupting the story in which hate comes naturally and offering an experience that suggests a new one. — Charles Eisenstein

To be fully in service to something one has experienced as real is the essence of leadership in a nonhierarchical age. A leader is the holder of a story, someone whose experience of its reality is deep enough so that she can hold the belief on behalf of others. — Charles Eisenstein

The gift economy represents a shift from consumption to contribution, transaction to trust, scarcity to abundance and isolation to community. — Charles Eisenstein

Love is the felt experience of connection to another being. An economist says 'more for you is less for me.' But the lover knows that more of you is more for me too. If you love somebody their happiness is your happiness. Their pain is your pain. Your sense of self expands to include other beings. This shift of consciousness is universal in everybody, 99% and 1%. — Charles Eisenstein

It is art's task to make manifest the contradictions of Being — Sergei Eisenstein

We sense that 'normal' isn't coming back, that we are being born into a new normal: a new kind of society, a new relationship to the earth, a new experience of being human. — Charles Eisenstein

We are not just a skin-encapsulated ego, a soul encased in flesh. We are each other and we are the world. — Charles Eisenstein

The financial crisis we are facing today arises from the fact that there is almost no more social, cultural, natural, and spiritual capital left to convert into money. — Charles Eisenstein

One should make movies innocently - the way Adam and Eve named the animals, their first day in the garden ... Learn from your own interior vision of things, as if there had never been a D.W.Griffith, or a Eisenstein, or a [John] Ford, or a [Jean] Renoir, or anybody. — Orson Welles

There are many photos of Eisenstein. I think he was quite vain, and he liked photos of him. Being a virgin at 33 is strange now, but let's not be too high-minded about that. — Peter Greenaway

[Akiro] Kurosawa, no doubt, was a big influence. Movies sometimes more than directors have influenced me: The Grapes of Wrath, by John Ford, was an extraordinary discovery. Sergei Eisenstein, of course. Later on, [Ingmar] Bergman. — Costa-Gavras

From our immersion in scarcity arise the habits of scarcity. From the scarcity of time arises the habit of hurrying. From the scarcity of money comes the habit of greed. From the scarcity of attention comes the habit of showing off. From the scarcity of meaningful labor comes the habit of laziness. From the scarcity of unconditional acceptance comes the habit of manipulation. — Charles Eisenstein

How beautiful can life be? We hardly dare imagine it. — Charles Eisenstein

The hippies saw it and lived it for a few shining moments, but the old stories were too strong. Instead of the hippies pulling us all into a new world, we dragged them back into ours. The — Charles Eisenstein

It is time to remind Sharon that the star of David belongs to all Jews, not to his repulsive Government. His actions are staining the star of David with blood. The Jewish people, whose gifts to civilised discourse include Einstein and Epstein, Mendelssohn and Mahler, Sergei Eisenstein and Billy Wilder, are now symbolised throughout the world by the blustering bully Ariel Sharon, a war criminal implicated in the murder of Palestinians at the Sabra and Shatila camps and now involved in killing Palestinians once again. — Gerald Kaufman

Is it too much to ask, to live in a world where our human gifts go toward the benefit of all? Where our daily activities contribute to the healing of the biosphere and the well-being of other people? — Charles Eisenstein

The same interbeingness that makes us so immensely vulnerable also makes us immensely powerful. Remember this! Indeed, the vulnerability and the power go hand in hand, because only by relaxing the guard of the separate self can we tap into power beyond its ken. Only then can we accomplish things that are, to the separate self, impossible. Put another way, we become capable of things that we don't know how to "make" happen. — Charles Eisenstein

You can't just do whatever you feel like." "You can't just do anything you want." "You have to learn self-restraint." "You're only interested in gratifying your desires." "You don't care about anything but your own pleasure." Can you hear the judgmentality in these admonitions? Can you see how they reproduce the mentality of domination that runs our civilization? Goodness comes through conquest. Health comes through conquering bacteria. Agriculture is improved by eliminating pests. Society is made safe by winning the war on crime. On my walk today, students accosted me, asking if I wanted to join the "fight" against pediatric cancer. There are so many fights, crusades, campaigns, so many calls to overcome the enemy by force. No wonder we apply the same strategy to ourselves. Thus it is that the inner devastation of the Western psyche matches exactly the outer devastation it has wreaked upon the planet. Wouldn't you like to be part of a different kind of revolution? — Charles Eisenstein

When we must pay the true price for the depletion of nature's gifts, materials will become more precious to us, and economic logic will reinforce, and not contradict, our heart's desire to treat the world with reverence and, when we receive nature's gifts, to use them well. — Charles Eisenstein

We have to believe in a more beautiful world in order to serve it. — Charles Eisenstein

A fundamental premise of this book is that human beings naturally desire to give. We are born into gratitude: the knowledge we have received and the desire to give in turn. Far from nudging reluctant people to give unto others against their lazy impulses, today's economy pressures us to deny our innate generosity and channel our gifts instead toward the perpetuation of a system that serves almost no one. A sacred — Charles Eisenstein

I think most kids have a sense that it's not supposed to be this way. You're not supposed to hate Monday, or be happy when you don't have to go to school. School should be something that you love. Life should be something that you love. — Charles Eisenstein

What you're looking for, you won't find. But only by looking for it can it find you. — Charles Eisenstein

The things we need most are the things we have become most afraid of, such as adventure, intimacy, and authentic communication. We avert our eyes and stick to comfortable topics. We hold it as a virtue to be private, to be discreet, so that no one sees our dirty laundry. We are uncomfortable with intimacy and connection, which are among the greatest of our unmet needs today. To be truly seen and heard, to be truly known, is a deep human need. Our hunger for it is so omnipresent, so much apart of our life experience, that we no more know what it is missing than a fish knows it is wet. We need more intimacy than nearly anyone considers normal. Always hungry for it, we seek solace and sustenance in the closest available substitutes: television, shopping, pornography, conspicuous consumption - anything to ease the hurt, to feel connected, or to project an image by which we might be seen or known, or at least see and know ourselves. — Charles Eisenstein

Through a million little choices every day, we are cashing in the earth. — Charles Eisenstein

There have been only three epoch-making mathematicians, Archimedes, Newton, and Eisenstein. — Carl Friedrich Gauss

From the scarcity of time arises the habit of hurrying. From the scarcity of money comes the habit of greed. From the scarcity of attention comes the habit of showing off. From the scarcity of meaningful labor comes the habit of laziness. From the scarcity of unconditional acceptance comes the habit of manipulation. These — Charles Eisenstein

I did not act from the habits of separation after my walk is not that I tried not to or chose not to. It is because of the attention I gave to the habits themselves and to the feelings underneath them. To give attention to a habit weakens its compulsion. To give attention to the condition underlying the habit robs it of its motivation. The feeling underlying all of my little plans was a kind of tender, helpless loneliness. I gave attention to these things without even having an agenda of stopping myself from acting on them. I trusted the power of attention to do its work. — Charles Eisenstein

This narrative lends itself too easily to centralized solutions and the mentality of maximizing (or minimizing) a number. It subordinates all the small, local things we need to do to create a more beautiful world to a single cause for which all else must be sacrificed. This is the mentality of war, in which an all-important end trumps any compunctions about the means and justifies any sacrifice. We — Charles Eisenstein

Some of us may have experienced it when we find ourselves cooperating naturally and effortlessly, instruments of a purpose greater than ourselves that, paradoxically, makes us individual more and not less when we abandon ourselves to it. It is what musicians are referring to when they say "The music played the band — Charles Eisenstein

The profession of film director can and should be such a high and precious one; that no man aspiring to it can disregard any knowledge that will make him a better film director or human being. — Sergei Eisenstein

Enlightenment is a group activity. — Charles Eisenstein

I advocate giving full attention to the pain that arises with the breakdown of an addiction and the story that embeds it. (The "addiction" can be something subtle, a self-image, for example, or thoughts about how ethical or successful one is.) Just as it feels good to meet a need, an unmet need hurts. Pain is its call for attention. When all the substitutes for meeting that need are exhausted, when all the palliatives stop working, finally the pain that had been diffuse and latent leads us to the need. — Charles Eisenstein

One of the ways that your project, your personal healing, or your social invention can change the world is through story. But even if no one ever learns of it, even if it is invisible to every human on Earth, it will have no less of an effect. — Charles Eisenstein

More than a mere alternative strategy, regenerative agriculture represents a fundamental shift in our culture's relationship to nature. — Charles Eisenstein

Evidence and logic are tools we use to justify and flesh out our beliefs, but we are deceiving ourselves to think that they are the source of our beliefs. I will return to this idea, because it is crucial to understanding the process of belief change as well; and clearly, for our world to have a chance of surviving, a lot of beliefs are going to have to change. — Charles Eisenstein

When ideas are detached from the media used to transmit them, they are also cut off from the historical circumstances that shape them, and it becomes difficult to perceive the changing context within which they must be viewed. — Elizabeth L. Eisenstein

Pleasure, remember, is among other things the feeling we get from satisfying a need. The more powerful the need, the greater the pleasure. To follow this principle requires, first, accepting that our needs are valid and even beautiful. And not just our needs, but our desires as well, coming as they do from unmet needs. — Charles Eisenstein

What is power, after all? Every one of the power elite's overwhelming advantages - military forces, surveillance systems, crowd control technology, control over the media, and nearly all the money in the world - depends on having people obeying orders and executing an assigned role. This obedience is a matter of shared ideologies, institutional culture, and the legitimacy of the systems in which we play roles. Legitimacy is a matter of collective perception, and we have the power to change people's perceptions. — Charles Eisenstein

Ather than Eisenstein's fast and hard cutting, I like to hold the shot very still and for longer than we're accustomed to. For me personally as a viewer, this technique invariably causes me to have waves of emotions that I think arise from a profound form of mindful awareness and the feelings that go along with that. I am frequently brought to tears by this kind of existential cinematic technique. — Jenni Olson

Accordingly, to create objects with soul, objects for a rich and beautiful world, we must invest them with life, self, and humanity; in other words, we must invest them with something of our selves. No — Charles Eisenstein

the rhythm of the phases of action and stillness has an intelligence of its own. If we tune in, we can hear that rhythm, and the organ of perception is the desire, the nudge of excitement or the feeling of flow, of rightness, of alignment. It is a feeling of being alive. To listen to that feeling and to trust it is a profound revolution indeed. — Charles Eisenstein

The state of interbeing is a vulnerable state. It is the vulnerability of the naive altruist, of the trusting lover, of the unguarded sharer. To enter it, one must leave behind the seeming shelter of a control-based life, protected by walls of cynicism, judgment, and blame. — Charles Eisenstein

Before they are able to enter a new story, most people - and probably most societies as well - must first navigate the passage out of the old. In between the old and the new there is an empty space. It is a time when the lessons and learnings of the old story are integrated. Only when that work has been done is the old story really complete. Then, there is nothing, the pregnant emptiness from which all being arises. Returning to essence, we regain the ability to act from essence. Returning to the space between stories, we can choose from freedom and not from habit. — Charles Eisenstein

feel that, in a way, with the people near me and myself, it is much easier to give ourselves to what we do without fear, with true joy and with a feeling of belonging. — Charles Eisenstein

Zillah Eisenstein uses the term 'decoy' to describe the way in which 'imperialist democracy' covers over its structural sins with a thin veneer of representational respectability: 'The manipulation of race and gender as decoys for democracy reveals the corruptibility of identity politics.'4 Getting women and ethnic minorities into positions of power is not necessarily going to improve the lives of women and ethnic minorities in general, and certainly hasn't so far. — Nina Power

Property is, after all, a social convention, an agreement about someone's exclusive right to use a thing in specified ways. However, we seem to have forgotten this. We seem to think that property belongs to us in some essential way, that it is of us. We seem to think that our property is part of ourselves, and that by owning it we therefore make ourselves more, larger, greater. — Charles Eisenstein

Trust your intuition and be guided by love. — Charles Eisenstein

We have bigger houses but smaller families;
more conveniences, but less time;
We have more degrees, but less sense;
more knowledge, but less judgment;
more experts, but more problems;
more medicines, but less healthiness;
We've been all the way to the moon and back,
but have trouble crossing the street to meet
the new neighbor.
We've built more computers to hold more
information to produce more copies than ever,
but have less communications;
We have become long on quantity,
but short on quality.
These times are times of fast foods;
but slow digestion;
Tall man but short character;
Steep profits but shallow relationships.
It is time when there is much in the window,
but nothing in the room.

--authorship unknown
from Sacred Economics — Charles Eisenstein

Down the steps,
... over the corpses,
... careers the pram with the child. — Sergei Eisenstein

Here is another paradox: We become better people only when we give up the quest to become better people. That — Charles Eisenstein

The holistic acupuncturist and the sea turtle rescuer may not be able to explain the feeling, 'We are serving the same thing,' but they are. Both are in service to an emerging story of the People that is the defining mythology of a new kind of civilization. — Charles Eisenstein

You can't have community as an add-on to a monetized life. You have to actually need each other. — Charles Eisenstein

The Situational Character: A Critical Realist Perspective on the Human Animal" by Jon D. Hanson and David G. Yosifon, along with its companion piece, "The Situation: An Introduction to the Situational Character, Critical Realism, Power Economics, and Deep Capture." Situationism — Charles Eisenstein

Now why should the cinema follow the forms of theater and painting rather than the methodology of language, which allows wholly new concepts of ideas to arise from the combination of two concrete denotations of two concrete objects? — Sergei Eisenstein

Addiction, self-sabotage, procrastination, laziness, rage, chronic fatigue, and depression are all ways that we withhold our full participation in the program of life we are offered. When the conscious mind cannot find a reason to say no, the unconscious says no in its own way. — Charles Eisenstein

When you hear the phrase "rescue the financial system," translate it in your mind into "keep the debts on the books." They are trying to find a way for you (and debtor nations too) to keep paying and for the debt to keep growing. — Charles Eisenstein

Play is the production of fun; entertainment is the consumption of fun. — Charles Eisenstein

In fact, our bodies are never the same--each minute, they undergo changes, even if imperceptible. Eisenstein (2001, 40-41) points out that we have many bodies, which influence our accounts of reality: 'Writing from the body, my body, my different bodies, I have different stories to tell. They are all all of a piece although they are also fragmentary as through each body experience has its own narration (13). — Barbara Sutton

We need to change our habits of thought, belief, and doing as well as change our systems. Each level reinforces the other: Our habits and beliefs form the psychic substructure of our system, which in turn induces in us the corresponding beliefs and habits. — Charles Eisenstein

It is quite normal to fear what one most desires. We desire to transcend the Story of the World that has come to enslave us, that indeed is killing the planet. We fear what the end of that story will bring: the demise of much that is familiar.
Fear it or not, it is happening already. — Charles Eisenstein

Contemporaneous with the financial crisis we have an ecological crisis and a health crisis. They are intimately interlinked. We cannot convert much more of the earth into money, or much more of our health into money, before the basis of life itself is threatened. — Charles Eisenstein

We are all here to contribute our gifts toward something greater than ourselves, and will never be content unless we are. — Charles Eisenstein

There is a time to act, and a time to wait, to listen, to observe. Then understanding and clarity can grow. From understanding, action arises that is purposeful, firm, and powerful. — Charles Eisenstein

There is a vast territory between what we're trying to leave behind, and where we want to go - and we don't have any maps for that territory. — Charles Eisenstein

Utopia is a collective shift of perception away. Abundance is all around us. Only our efforts at tower-building blind us to it, our gaze forever skyward, forever seeking to escape this Earth, this feeling, this moment. — Charles Eisenstein

We need to ground environmentalism on something other than data. — Charles Eisenstein

If you want a convincing account of just how deep the shift in our new axial age is and must be, look no further than this brilliant book by Charles Eisenstein, one of the deepest integrative thinkers active today. — Michel Bauwens

Where, then, do we find the truth? We find it in the body, in the woods, in the water, in the soil. We find it in music, dance, and sometimes in poetry. We find it in a baby's face, and in the adult's face behind the mask. We find it in each other's eyes, when we look. We find it in an embrace, which is, when we feel into it, being to being, an incredibly intimate act. We find it in laughter and sobs, and we find it in the voice behind the spoken word. We find it in fairy tales and myths, and the tales we tell, even if fictional. Sometimes embroidering a tale enlarges it as a vehicle for the truth. We find it in silence and stillness. We find it in pain and loss. We find it in birth and death. — Charles Eisenstein

We are born creators, here to achieve the exuberant expression of our gifts. The — Charles Eisenstein

Ten Days That Shook The World, by Eisenstein, I went to see it, and I was so impressed with this film, so impressed with what cinema could do. — Francis Ford Coppola

We have to create miracles. A miracle is not the intersession of an external divine agency in violation of the laws of physics. A miracle is simply something that is impossible from an old story but possible from within a new one. It is an expansion of what is possible. — Charles Eisenstein

The procrastination, the laziness, the halfhearted attempts, the going through the motions - all indicate that the old story isn't motivating you anymore. What once made sense, makes sense no longer. You are beginning to withdraw from that world. Society does its best to persuade you to resist that withdrawal, which, when resisted, is called depression. — Charles Eisenstein

They are the responses of a wounded person, cut off from the intimate connections that form a robust identity, and conditioned through conditional acceptance and rejection at a tender age to adopt a deep-seated self-rejection that leaves him ever hungry for approval. All of the habits of separation are symptoms, and only secondarily causes, of our — Charles Eisenstein

When both sides of a controversy revel in the defeat and humiliation of the other side, in fact they are on the same side: the side of war. — Charles Eisenstein

Eisenstein was a good editor. I was trained as a film editor, and I've no doubt that the editor is key to a film. — Peter Greenaway

To name is to dominate, to categorize, to subjugate and, quite literally, to objectify — Charles Eisenstein

A lot of people don't know what democracy and power really is. The real power is held by whichever social class has ownership and control of the means of production, economy and state apparatus. In capitalist society, the big business class has this power. Democracy is the will of the majority of the ruling class being put into law and action. So in a capitalist democracy, the big business class has the power through their control of the means of production, economy and state apparatus. People voting in elections is not the real power at all.
Until the workers in society democratically control the means of production, economy and state apparatus, which will enable society to be run in the interests of the wants and needs of the mass population, then big business will continue ruling in the interests of corporate profit, which means the super-rich elite exploiting all of us. — Charles Eisenstein

When we attempt to reduce the infinitely precious to a number, monstrosities result. For — Charles Eisenstein

There are puppet-masters, but they are systems and ideologies, not people. As — Charles Eisenstein