Seeking Outside Quotes & Sayings

If happiness comes at all: which is by no means prearranged; it comes by the way, while you are seeking for something else. Something outside yourself, beyond yourself: in a brief absorption of self-forgetfulness. — Caitlin Thomas

Those who are seeking the true religion will never find it outside the Catholic Church alone, because, in every other religion, if they trace it up to the author, they will find some impostor whose imagination furnished a mass of sophisms and errors — Alphonsus Liguori

Dress up and wait for me outside your house. I'll show you a pleasure-seeking night full of gluttony and lust. And that's only the ride in Her Majesty. — Alexandra Iff

We believe deep down that we've lost something precious and are seeking it outside ourselves, never realizing that we are carrying it within us wherever we go. — Tsoknyi Rinpoche

The motive behind my arguments have always been to come at truth. I am not interested in conquering anyone with my ideologies or seeking converts. There are no absolute philosophies, not one argument that does not have its drawbacks. To paint debates as homogenous is to insult those who risked thinking outside of the box, the people who made our civilization possible. — Crystal Evans

Inherent in the impulse to be free, is insecurity. The impulse to be free comes from outside of the mind, and because of this, it makes the mind feel very insecure. Most spiritual seekers move away from this insecurity by seeking and striving for a distant spiritual goal. That's how they avoid feeling insecure. — Adyashanti

You're treated as though you're just a piece of meat, and you're there for consumption by men. I feel like the common thing is men feeling entitled to treat you how they want to treat you. You never feel as though you have a right to the space. And so that's the theme behind most of the posters - "I'm not outside for your entertainment" and "I'm not seeking your validation." — Tatyana Fazlalizadeh

For dealing with blessings which come to us from outside we need a firm foundation based on reason and education; without this foundation, people keep on seeking these blessings and heaping them up but can never satisfy the insatiable appetites of their souls. — Plutarch

A human being, appearances to the contrary, doesn't create his own purposes. These are imposed by the time he's born into; he may serve them, he may rebel against them, but the object of his service or rebellion comes from the outside. To experience complete freedom in seeking his purposes he would have to be alone, and that's impossible, since a person who isn't brought up among people cannot become a person. — Stanislaw Lem

I did not find you outside, O Lord, because I made the mistake of seeking outside you who were within — Saint Augustine

Know that God has a plan for your life. Turn your life over to him every day. Stop looking outside yourself for validation and approval-you're letting other people define your happiness. Instead of trying so hard to manipulate life, take care of yourself on the inside. Then all those other attributes you're so desperately seeking will find you eventually. — Trisha Yearwood

The world's religions are tribal and xenophobic by nature, serving to regulate moral rules within the community but not seeking to embrace humanity outside their circle. Religion, by definition, forms an identity of those like us, in sharp distinction from those not us, those heathens, those unbelievers. Most religions were pulled into the modern Enlightenment with their fingernails dug into the past. Change in religious beliefs and practices, when it happens at all, is slow and cumbersome, and it is almost always in response to the church or its leaders facing outside political or cultural forces. — Michael Shermer

Temptations are enemies outside the castle seeking entrance. If there be no false retainer within who holds treacherous parley, there can scarcely be even an offer. — Henry Ward Beecher

I am more touched, still, that you are trying to understand - through rational thought - that which cannot be understood at all. The divine, as Boehme said, is unground, unfathomable, something outside the world as we experience it. But this is a difference of our minds, dearest one. I wish to arrive on wings, while you advance steadily on foot, magnifying glass in hand. I am a smattering wanderer, seeking God within the outer contours, searching for a new way of knowing. You stand upon the ground, and consider the evidence inch by inch. Your way is more rational and more methodical, but I cannot change my way. — Elizabeth Gilbert

I don't run for trains." Snub your destiny. I have taught myself to resist running to keep on schedule. This may seem a very small piece of advice, but it registered. In refusing to run to catch trains, I have felt the true value of elegance and aesthetics in behavior, a sense of being in control of my time, my schedule, and my life. Missing a train is only painful if you run after it! Likewise, not matching the idea of success others expect from you is only painful if that's what you are seeking. You stand above the rat race and the pecking order, not outside of it, if you do so by choice. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Tengo stood by the window and looked at the scene outside. Beyond the garden and lawn was the dark line of the pine windbreak, through which came the sound of waves. The rough waves of the Pacific. It was thick, darkish sound, as if many souls were gathered, each whispering his story. They seemed to be seeking more souls to join them, seeking even more stories to be told. — Haruki Murakami

If you are seeking the counsel of God on a directional matter in your life, never get so caught up in the specifics of your own situation that you selfishly forget about others. Don't neglect the poor. Think outside yourself. It's liberating! Likewise, — John Crowder

In asking for miracles, we are seeking a practical goal: a return to inner peace. We're not asking for something outside us to change, but for something inside us to change. We're looking for a softer orientation to life. — Marianne Williamson

If they lived in Saudi Arabia, under Shari'a law, these college girls in their pretty scarves wouldn't be free to study, to work, to drive, to walk around. In Saudi Arabia girls their age and younger are confined, are forced to marry, and if they have sex outside of marriage they are sentenced to prison and flogged. According to the Quran, their husband is permitted to beat them and decide whether they may work or even leave the house; he may marry other women without seeking their approval, and if he chooses to divorce them, they have no right to resist or to keep custody of their children. Doesn't this matter at all to these clever young Muslim girls in America? — Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Fulfillment, Shevek thought, is a function of time. The search for pleasure is circular, repetitive, atemporal, The variety seeking of the spectator, the thrill hunter, the sexually promiscuous, always ends in the same place. It has an end. It comes to the end and has to start over. It is not a journey and return, but a closed cycle, a locked room, a cell.
Outside the locked room is the landscape of time, in which the spirit may, with luck and courage, construct the fragile, makeshift, improbable roads and cities of fidelity: a landscape inhabitable by human beings.
It is not until an act occurs within the landscape of the past and the future that it is a human act. Loyalty, which asserts the continuity of past and future, binding time into a whole, is the root of human strength; there is no good to be done without it. — Ursula K. Le Guin

The whole immigration issue suggests the inevitability of people in our time seeking economic security that they can't find at home, which usually involves bringing their religion with them. One's children are going to be married to people outside their religious traditions as well as inside. — Thomas Keating

There are now little brass plaques on the ground outside this address.
These are Stolpersteine.
Tributes to the victims of the Holocaust.
There are many of them in Berlin, especially in Charlottenburg.
They are not easy to spot.
You must walk with your head down, seeking memories between the cobblestones.
In front of 15 Wielandstrasse, three names can be read.
Paula, Albert, and Charlotte.
But on the wall, there is only one commemorative plaque.
The one for Charlotte Salomon. — David Foenkinos

For this reason, my dear Sir, the only advice I have is this: to go into yourself and to examine the depths from which your life springs; at its source you will find the answer to the question of whether you have to write. Accept this answer as it is, without seeking to interpret it. Perhaps it will turn out that you are called to be an artist. Then assume this fate and bear it, its burden and its greatness, without ever asking after the rewards that may come from outside. For he who creates must be a world of his own and find everything within himself and in the natural world that he has elected to follow. — Rainer Maria Rilke

All this is flashy rhetoric about loving you.
I never had a selfless thought since I was born.
I am mercenary and self-seeking through and through:
I want God, you, all friends, merely to serve my turn.
Peace, re-assurance, pleasure, are the goals I seek,
I cannot crawl one inch outside my proper skin:
I talk of love
a scholar's parrot may talk Greek
But, self-imprisoned, always end where I begin.
Only that now you have taught me (but how late) my lack.
I see the chasm. And everything you are was making
My heart into a bridge by which I might get back
From exile, and grow man. And now the bridge is breaking.
For this I bless you as the ruin falls. The pains
You give me are more precious than all other gains. — C.S. Lewis

Like Gnostics, contemporaries feel alienated from their roots and are seeking to overcome the alienation. They are seeking new outlets for their unconscious. Where Gnostics feel cut off from the outer world, contemporaries feel cut off from the inner one. Contemporaries do not, like Gnostics, project their alienation onto the cosmos; through Jungian psychology they seek to discover their true selves within rather than outside themselves. They alone, then, have the chance fully to overcome their alienation. — C. G. Jung

If it were true, that old legend about appearing before a supreme judge and naming one's record, I would offer, with all my pride, not any act I committed, but one thing I have never done on this earth: that I never sought an outside sanction. I would stand and say: I am Gail Wynand, the man who has committed every crime except the foremost one: that of ascribing futility to the wonderful act of existence and seeking justification beyond myself. This is my pride: that now, thinking of the end, I don not cry like all the men of my age: but what was the use and the meaning? I was the use and meaning. I, Gail Wynand. That I lived and that I acted. — Ayn Rand

You and I were created to realize and experience God. He created us in such a way that nothing outside of Him, nothing above, on, or within the earth will completely satisfy us. If we experienced all the riches and selfish pleasures one could...we'd still wake up unfulfilled. To quench and satisfy our spirits we need to search no further than within our own hearts. That's where we'll find the very essence and dwelling place of God. — Jason Versey

One individual is his or her own best teacher, and no other idol or false image should be worshiped or adored because the God we are all seeking lies inside oneself, not outside. — Shirley Maclaine

Until competency management platforms gain widespread acceptance, "badges" or "stackable credentials" are unlikely to gain much traction. The notion that educated adults, like the boy and girl scouts they once were, will prefer to flaunt a collection of badges testifying to skills they have demonstrated is flawed for one reason. While degrees are validated by a single institution with a recognizable form (i.e., colleges and universities), who is validating a collection of badges? Who vouches that a student has demonstrated a given skill? Although many visionary organizations are seeking to enter this market, outside of IT none currently has the ability or credibility to authenticate such credentials in a way that would be acceptable to a critical mass of employers and students. — Ryan Craig

In the same year, the publication of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique added fuel to the fire of a growing feminist discontent. The author spoke to middle-class White women, bored in suburbia (an escape hatch from increasingly Black cities) and seeking sanction to work at a "meaningful" job outside the home. Not only were the problems of the White suburban housewife (who may have had Black domestic help) irrelevant to Black women, they were also alien to them. Friedan's observation that "I never knew a woman, when I was growing up, who used her mind, played her own part in the world, and also loved, and had children" seemed to come from another planet. — Paula J. Giddings

Among the books there were also some containing bombast. They didn't try to portray Nature as it is within and outside of man; rather, they tried to make it more beautiful, seeking to elicit certain effects. I turned away from them. If reality isn't sacred to them, how are they capable of creating something more beautiful than God's Creation? — Adalbert Stifter

If we are seeking to serve the God of truth then we should really welcome truth from whatever source it comes. We shouldn't fear the truth. Some of it will be from science, obviously, but by no means all of it. It will sometimes by perplexing, how this bit of truth relates to that bit of truth; we know that within science itself often enough and we find it outside of science as well. The crucial thing is to be honest. — John Polkinghorne

A home should be an intimate autobiography of the things that you like. One of the things I'm so keen on expressing is that, if you don't do it for yourself, if you're always seeking affirmation from outside, you'll never have a home. It'll just be a house. — Alexandra Stoddard

The ability to send applications by post allows fraudsters to apply in false or stolen identities without fear of arrest and to make multiple applications in the hope of getting one through. It allows the possibility of passports being applied for with the photographs of people who are outside the U.K. and seeking to enter illegally. — Des Browne

I have been told that when a baby bird is ready to hatch, if you break the egg for the bird, it will die. The bird must peck its own way out of the egg into the world. This aggressive "workout" strengthens the bird, allowing it to function in the outside world. Robbed of this responsibility, it will die. This is also the way God has made us. If he "hatches" us, does our work for us, invades our boundaries, we will die. We must not shrink back passively. Our boundaries can only be created by our being active and aggressive, by our knocking, seeking, and asking — Henry Cloud

She had always known that all lives are in common, rejoicing in her kinship to the fish in the tanks of her laboratories, seeking the experience of existences outside the human boundary. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Man struggles to find life outside himself, unaware that the life he is seeking is within him. — Kahlil Gibran

This was the thing that terrified me the most - more than the victim, more than the demon, more even than the dark thoughts. It was the fact that the dark thoughts were mine. That I couldn't separate myself from evil, because most of the evil in my life came from inside my own head.
How long could I live like this? I was trying to be two people - a killer on the inside, and a normal person on the outside. I made such a show of being a good, quiet kid, who never caused problem and never got into trouble, but now the monster was out, and I was actually using him - I was actively seeking out another killer. I'd given in. I was trying to be John and Mr. Monster at the same time.
Was I fooling myself, thinking that I could split my life like this? Was it possible to be two people, one good and one bad, or was I forced to be a mix of both - a good person forever tainted by evil? — Dan Wells

What you seek, you already are. Your awareness has its source in unity. Instead of seeking outside yourself, go to the source and realize who you are. Seeking — Deepak Chopra

The best advice I ever heard is, don't take anyone else's advice." There's power in this because it puts you in the conductor's seat, right at "the controls" in your life. It doesn't mean you should stop seeking information or outside input, it just means that you're the one driving. You choose your own destination. — Sherry Argov

Seeking validation, inner peace, and happiness outside of yourself is like trying to find a bus to take you home when you're already at home. The only source of inner peace and happiness exists within you already. — Derek Doepker

It only meant that my natural inclination was to draw my "energy" from within instead of seeking it outside myself, plus my mom was an introvcert, and so were a lot of normal people. The problem was I was shy on top of that. And we all know how the world loves a shy introvert. — Sue Monk Kidd

Eventually we grow weary of seeking treasures outside
ourselves and we begin to look within. There we discover
that the gold we sought, we already are. — Alan Cohen

Am touched that you are trying to comprehend me. A friend could not be more loving. I am more touched, still, that you are trying to understand - through rational thought - that which cannot be understood at all. There is no exact principle to be found here. The divine, as Boehme said, is unground - unfathomable, something outside the world as we experience it. But this is a difference of our minds, dearest one. I wish to arrive at revelation on wings, while you advance steadily on foot, magnifying glass in hand. I am a smattering wanderer, seeking God within the outer contours, searching for a new way of knowing. You stand upon the ground, and consider the evidence inch by inch. Your way is more rational and more methodical, but I cannot change my way." "I do have a dreadful love for understanding," Alma admitted. "Indeed you do love it, though it is not dreadful, — Elizabeth Gilbert

Now the need for seeking something outside will completely disappear. Once you are blissful by your own nature, your life becomes an expression of your blissfulness, not a pursuit of happiness. — Sadhguru

We often seek beauty in the outside, in the unknown, and often lack to realize the sheer beauty right in front of our very eyes, back home. — Akilnathan Logeswaran

We are forever looking outside ourselves, seeking approval and striving to impress others. But living to please others is a poor substitute for self-love, for no matter how family and friends may adore us, they can never satisfy our visceral need to love and honor ourselves. — Susan L. Taylor

A lost men is not a direction but a self-seeking outside God. — Evans Biya

A lost men is not direction based but self-seeking outside God — Evans Biya

Enmeshment creates almost total dependence on approval and validation from outside yourself. Lovers, bosses, friends, even strangers become the stand-in for parents. Adults like Kim who were raised in families where there was no permission to be an individual frequently become approval junkies, constantly seeking their next fix. — Susan Forward

For though, outside the Exercises, we can lawfully and with merit influence every one who is probably fit to choose continence, virginity, the religious life and all manner of evangelical perfection, still in the Spiritual Exercises, when seeking the Divine Will, it is more fitting and much better, that the Creator and Lord Himself should communicate Himself to His devout soul, inflaming it with His love and praise, and disposing it for the way in which it will be better able to serve Him in future. So, he who is giving the Exercises should not turn or incline to one side or the other, but standing in the centre like a balance, leave the Creator to act immediately with the creature, and the creature with its Creator and Lord. — Ignatius Of Loyola

Happiness is your nature. It is not wrong to desire it. What is wrong is seeking it outside when it is inside. — Ramana Maharshi

Deep attention, the cognitive style traditionally associated with the humanities, is characterized by concentrating on a single object for long periods (say, a novel by Dickens), ignoring outside stimuli while so engaged, preferring a single information stream, and having a high tolerance for long focus times. Hyper attention is characterized by switching focus rapidly among different tasks, preferring multiple information streams, seeking a high level of stimulation, and having a low tolerance for boredom. — N. Katherine Hayles

Music gives me a sense of self-sufficiency and nourishment. I don't need anyone or anything. I bathe in it as in amniotic fluid; it surrounds and protects me. It's also stable, ever-available and something I can control - that is, I can reach for it whenever I want. I can also choose music that reflects my mood, or if I want, helps to soothe it ... music-seeking offers excitement and tension that I can immediately resolve and a reward I can immediately attain - unlike other tensions in my life and other desired rewards. Music is a source of beauty and meaning outside myself that I can claim as my own without exploring how, in my life, I keep from directly experiencing those qualities. Addiction, in this sense, is the lazy man's path to transcendence. — Gabor Mate

There is no exact principle to be found here. The divine, as Boehme said, is unground - unfathomable, something outside the world as we experience it. But this is a difference of our minds, dearest one. I wish to arrive at revelation on wings, while you advance steadily on foot, magnifying glass in hand. I am a smattering wanderer, seeking God within the outer contours, searching for a new way of knowing. You stand upon the ground, and consider the evidence inch by inch. Your way is more rational and more methodical, but I cannot change my way." "I do have a dreadful love for — Elizabeth Gilbert

The nation has been turned upside down and inside out. The country that was once discovered by people seeking religious freedom is now oppressing religious rights. It has been a slow train rumbling down the track of destruction since the 1960's. It started with the removal of the Bible from our public schools. Next the generation known as the 'love generation' opened the door for the approval of sex outside of marriage. For every ten years since then, it's been a slippery slope of materialism, I got mine, what can you do for me, and money is power.
We as a nation have stopped focusing on God and family and replaced them with money and success. Parents are teaching their children to do whatever it takes to get ahead ... just don't get caught. If you do, find someone to blame it on. — Rick Mayhew

Your awareness has its source in unity. Instead of seeking outside yourself, go to the source to realize who you are. — Deepak Chopra

We stop the one who can't cease from seeking things outside, and practice with our bodies with a posture that seeks absolutely nothing. This is zazen. — Kodo Sawaki

Today, we are tabling a motion seeking the support of the House for the government's decision to renew our military mission against ISIL for up to an additional 12 months. Our objectives remain the same: we intend to continue to degrade the capabilities of ISIL, that is, to degrade its ability to engage in military movements of scale, to operate bases in the open, to expand its presence in the region, and to propagate attacks outside the region. — Stephen Harper

Never forget to value yourself; never seek validation outside of yourself. — Debasish Mridha

Before Jaylee, I was always under the impression that people cheated on their spouses because they were seeking something outside of the marriage that was missing. I'm not sure if anything was lacking in my marriage to Robert. I wasn't looking; Jaylee just happened. Now I fear that I will never again experience the heights of desire that I feel when I'm with him and I'm mourning it before it's even gone. — Mara White