Liedloff Quotes & Sayings

There are three ways in which we are honest. And those three ways will make up the bulk of this book. The three ways are 1) living based on our values (lifestyle); 2) becoming comfortable with our intentions (boldness); and 3) by expressing our sexuality freely (communication). — Mark Manson

The highest level of prayer is not a prayer for anything. It is a deep and profound silence, in which we allow ourselves to be still and know Him. In that silence, we are changed. We are calmed. We are illumined. Prayer is meant to dissolve the worldly focus, to dissolve our sense of a separate self, to help us detach from an insane world order. We pray that He might flood our minds. Prayer is like pouring hot water on an ice cube, melting the cold and encrusted thought forms that still surround our hearts. — Marianne Williamson

This, at last, was where things were as they ought to be. Everything was in its place
the tree, the earth underneath, the rock, the moss. In autumn, it would be right; in winter under the snow, it would be perfect in its wintriness. Spring would come again and miracle within miracle would unfold, each at its special pace, some things having died off, some sprouting in their first spring, but all of equal and utter rightness. — Jean Liedloff

The reason for spiritual enlightenment is not to escape life, but to learn how to live it richly, to enjoy it.
The Language of Soul — Harold Klemp

Our parents, our tribesman, our authority figures, clearly expect us to be bad or anti-social or greedy or selfish or dirty or destructive or self-destructive. Our social nature is such that we tend to meet the expectations of our elders. Whenever this reversal took place and our elders stopped expecting us to be social and expected us to be anti-social, just to put it in gross terms, that's when the real fall took place. And we're paying for it dearly. — Jean Liedloff

Happiness ceases to be a normal condition of being alive, and becomes a goal. — Jean Liedloff

Our own system of trying to guess what or how much a child's mind can assimilate results in cross purposes, misunderstanding, disappointments, anger and a general loss of harmony. — Jean Liedloff

As a child I was attracted to Tarzan and everything that had to do with jungles. It seemed to me
and this is in retrospect
that there was something primal, something right about it. Tarzan represented a pure being, somehow before the fall. — Jean Liedloff

Children are God's way to rekindle the dwindling magic in relationships. — Nilesh Rathod

away from the ocean, heading toward the — Gail Carriger

Pain and illness, the deaths of those one loves, and discomforts and disappointments mar the happy norm, but they do not alter the fact that happiness is the norm, nor affect the tendency of the continuum to restore it, to heal it, after any disturbance. — Jean Liedloff

I've never met a successful pessimist. — William O'Neil

We take it for granted that life is hard and feel lucky to have whatever happiness we get. We do not look upon happiness as a birthright, nor do we expect it to be more than peace or contentment. Real joy, the state in which the Yequana spend much of their lives, is exceedingly rare among us. — Jean Liedloff

If you're playing your character and you're running into all these people who know who you are and treat you in a way that doesn't pertain at all to the character, it takes you out of it more, so when you're alone in a city where people don't know you, you can kind of pretend even more and get into the head space of where you need to be. — Chris Messina

The broader unquestioned premises upon which my own culture founded its view of the human condition, such as the one that Unhappiness is as legitimate a part of experience as happiness and necessary in order to render happiness appreciable, or that it is more advantageous to be young than to be old: those still took me a long time to pry loose for reexamination. — Jean Liedloff

The two words that I've arrived at to describe what we all need to feel about ourselves, children and adults, in order to perceive ourselves accurately, are worthy and welcome. If you don't feel worthy and welcome, you really won't know what to do with yourself. You won't know how to behave in a world of other people. You won't think you deserve to get what you need. — Jean Liedloff

Good people are always so sure they're right. — Barbara Graham

Giving up and doing something else (nursing, for me) was exactly what eventually led me to making music that other people wanted to hear. — John Darnielle

Watson and Liedloff are extreme cases, but a hint of the end times, in their secular incarnation, lurks in almost all guides to child rearing. It has to be there: the implicit appeal of any respectable child-care authority is that he or she is saving you from purgatory. After all, if there isn't a purgatory to be saved from, what are you so concerned about? Why are you consulting a child-care authority, anyway? — Nicholas Day

But I can tell - let truth be told - That love will change in growing old; Though day by day is nought to see, So delicate his motions be. — Robert Bridges

A baby's cry is precisely as serious as it sounds. — Jean Liedloff

No man is a man without high morals and ethics. — Mehmet Murat Ildan

Someone like Jean-Luc Godard is for me intellectual counterfeit money when compared to a good kung fu film. — Werner Herzog

It's perfectly clear that the millions of babies, who are crying at this very moment, want unanimously to be next to a live body. Do you really think they're all wrong? Theirs is the voice of nature. This is the clear, pure voice of nature, without intellectual interference. — Jean Liedloff

Children need to see that they are assumed to be well-intentioned, naturally social people who are trying to do the right thing and who want reliable reactions from their elders to guide them. — Jean Liedloff

Nobody's born rotten. You just don't have bad kids. It's not true. There is no such thing. But we can make them bad. — Jean Liedloff

I knew, even at eight, that the confusion of values thrust upon me by parents, teachers, other children, nannies, camp counselors, and others would only worsen as I grew up. The years would add complications and steer me into more and more impenetrable tangles of rights and wrongs, desirables and undesirables. I had already seen enough to know that. — Jean Liedloff

Temperaments shapes the way we experience the world. Our most important endeavour as teachers must be guiding student's education and helping them cope with challenges, taking risks, learning from failures and inspiring their growth. We need to motivate them to fulfill their potential, to push themselves out of their comfort zones and develop new skills by praising their focus, perseverance and improvement. — Andrea Brajnovic

especially when we get to Yosemite. There are grizzly bears there. — Eugene M. Gagliano

I would be ashamed to admit to the Indians that, where I come from, the women do not feel themselves capable of raising children until they read the instructions written in a book by a strange man. — Jean Liedloff

It is our genetic nature as a species to believe as young children that our parents and elders are right. We watch them to see what's what. Later on we can judge for ourselves and rebel if need be, but when we're just months old, or a year or two, and a parent looks at us with impatience, or disgust, or disdain, or just leaves us there to cry and doesn't answer us even though we're longing to be embraced and nurtured, we assume that something must be wrong with us. Unfortunately, at that age it's impossible to think there might be something wrong with them. — Jean Liedloff

Necessity hath no law. Feigned necessities, imaginary necessities, are the greatest cozenage men can put upon the Providence of God, and make pretences to break known rules by. — Oliver Cromwell