Quotes & Sayings About What Lies Within Us

I think that there is a terrible possibility now, in the World. We may not brush it away, we must look at it. It is possible that They will not die. That it is now within the state of Their art to go on forever - though we, of course, will keep dying as we always have. Death has been the source of Their power. It was easy enough for us to see that. If we are here once, only once, then clearly we are here to take what we can while we may. If They have taken much more, and taken not only from Earth but also from us - well, why begrudge Them, when they're just as doomed to die as we are? All in the same boat, all under the same shadow ... yes ... yes. But is that really true? Or is it the best, and the most carefully propagated, of all Their lies, known and unknown?
We have to carry on under the possibility that we die only because They want us to: because They need our terror for Their survival. — Thomas Pynchon

We are all guilty of crime the great crime of not living life to the full. But we are all potentially free. We can stop thinking of what we have failed to do and do whatever lies within our power. What those powers that are in us may be no one has truly dared to imagine. That they are infinite we will realize the day we admit to ourselves that imagination is everything. Imagination is the voice of daring. — Henry Miller

I'm sure you know a lot of people who were born into privilege and amounted to absolutely nothing. We all have greatness within us. So it is really important for everyone to figure out what God put us on Earth to do, and steer clear of the seven pervasive lies that often blindside people. — Farrah Gray

What lies behind us and what lies before us are small matters compared to what lies within us.
Ralph Waldo Emerson — Catherine E. McLean

In spite of all the talk and study about our next years, all the silent ponderings about what lies within them ... it seems plain to us that many things are wrong in the present ones that can be, must be, changed. Our texture of belief has great holes in it. Our pattern lacks pieces. — Mary Francis Kennedy Fisher

But I will tell you in all honesty that there is no Deity or Messiah, no Jesus or Muhammad, no angel or mythical spirit who can save you. Not even Buddha can save you, even if he or any of the other spirits wished it with all of their might, for your only salvation, if there is any, lies within you and you alone. Each of us has the potential for good as well as evil; it is whatever circumstances we find ourselves in and what choices we make in life which really takes us down one or the other path. — Andrew James Pritchard

When carving stone, the sculptor removes everything that is not the statue. [ ... ] The art of revealing beauty lies in removing what conceals it. So, too, Patanjali [in the Yoga Sutras] tells us that wholeness exists within us. Our work is to chisel away at everything that is not essence, not Self. — Judith Hanson Lasater

What beauty would we see around us, if for just one second we could acknowledge the beauty that lies within ourselves? — Monica Dumont

It's hard to believe that the truth lies within us. What about the churches, temples, mosques, bibles and scriptures? They offer comfort. If they cause you discomfort, toss them. — Art Hochberg

Why do we care about singers? Wherein lies the power of songs? Maybe it derives from the sheer strangeness of there being singing in the world. The note, the scale, the chord; melodies, harmonies, arrangements; symphonies, ragas, chinese operas,jazz, the blues: that such things should exist, that we should have discovered the magical intervals and distances that yield the poor cluster of notes, all within the span of a human hand from which we can build our cathedrals of sound, is alchemical a mystery as mathematics, or wine, or love. Maybe the birds taught us. Maybe not. Maybe we are just creatures in search of exaltation. We don't have much of it. Our lives are not what we deserve; they are, let us agree, in many painful ways deficient. Song turns them into something else. Song shows us a world that is worthy of our yearning, it shows us our selves as they might be, if we were worthy of the world. — Salman Rushdie

Forgiveness does not relieve someone of responsibility for what they have done. Forgiveness does not erase accountability. It is not about turning a blind eye or even turning the other cheek. It is not about letting someone off the hook or saying it is okay to do something monstrous. Forgiveness is simply about understanding that every one of us is both inherently good and inherently flawed. Within every hopeless situation and every seemingly hopeless person lies the possibility of transformation. — Desmond Tutu

Good books are rare, and to have a really good library, a few shelves are all we need. When I was still on my campus in India, I was convinced, like many professors, that if the Lord was to be found anywhere, it was in the lower stacks of the library. But now - just as when I go into a big department store, I can say, "How many things I don't need! How many expensive suits I don't want!" - when I enter a big library I say, "What tomes I don't have to read again! What folios I will never open!" This feeling of freedom will come to all of us when we realise, in the depths of our meditation, that all wisdom lies within. — Eknath Easwaran

What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lives within us. — Henry David Thoreau

What then did those immortals see, the writers who aimed at all which is greatest and scorned the accuracy which lies in every detail? They saw many other things and they also saw this, that Nature determined man to be no low or ignoble animal; but introducing us into life and this entire universe as into some vast assemblage, to be spectators, in a sort, of her entirety, and most ardent competitors, did then implant in our souls an invincible and eternal love of that which is great and, by our own standard, more devine. Therefore it is, that for the speculation and thought which are within the scope of human endeavour not all the universe together is sufficient, our conceptions often pass beyond the bounds which limit it; and if a man were to look upon life all around, and see how in all things the extraordinary, the great, the beautiful stand supreme, he will at once know for what ends we have been born. — Longinus

Our vanity, our passions, our spirit of imitation, our abstract intelligence, our habits have long been at work, and it is the task of art to undo this work of theirs, making us travel back in the direction from which we have come to the depths where what has really existed lies unknown within us. — Marcel Proust

What lies behind us is nothing compared to what lies within us and ahead of us. — Stephen R. Covey

Whatever we attempt is a reflection of our inner thirst, which we hope to quench in all these external ways. What we are looking for lies within us, and if we gave out time and energy to an interior search, we would come across it much faster, since that is the only place where it is to be found. — Ayya Khema

The havoc wrought by war, which one compares with the havoc wrought by nature, is not an unavoidable fate before which man stands helpless. The natural forces that are the cause of war are human passions, which it lies in our power to change. What are culture and civilization if not the taming of blind forces within us as well as in nature? — Ellen Key

makes me more than sad, it makes my heart burn within me, to see that folk can make a jest of striving men; of chaps who comed to ask for a bit o' fire for th' old granny, as shivers i' th' cold; for a bit o' bedding, and some warm clothing to the poor wife who lies in labour on th' damp flags; and for victuals for the childer, whose little voices are getting too faint and weak to cry aloud wi' hunger. For, brothers, is not them the things we ask for when we ask for more wage? We donnot want dainties, we want bellyfuls; we donnot want gimcrack coats and waistcoats, we want warm clothes; and so that we get 'em, we'd not quarrel wi' what they're made on. We donnot want their grand houses, we want a roof to cover us from the rain, and the snow, and the storm; ay, and not alone to cover us, but the helpless ones that cling to us in the keen wind, and ask us with their eyes why we brought 'em into th' world to suffer?" He — Elizabeth Gaskell

There is within us a fundamental dis-ease, an unquenchable fire that renders us incapable, in this life, of ever coming to full peace. This desire lies at the center of our lives, in the marrow of our bones, and in the deep recesses of the soul. At the heart of all great literature, poetry, art, philosophy, psychology, and religion lies the naming and analyzing of this desire. Spirituality is, ultimately, about what we do with that desire. What we do with our longings, both in terms of handling the pain and the hope they bring us, that is our spirituality . . . Augustine says: 'You have made us for yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.' Spirituality is about what we do with our unrest. — Ronald Rolheiser

What we have not had to decipher, to elucidate by our own efforts, what was clear before we looked at it, is not ours. From ourselves comes only that which we drag forth from the obscurity which lies within us, that which to others is unknown. — Marcel Proust

being attached in this way to any number of things, we're weighed down by them and dragged down. [16] That is why, if the weather prevents us from sailing, we sit there in a state of anxiety, constantly peering around. 'What wind is this?' The North Wind. And what does it matter to us and to him? 'When will the West Wind blow?' When it so chooses, my good friend, or rather, when Aeolus chooses; for God hasn't appointed you to be controller of the winds, he has appointed Aeolus. [17] What are we to do, then? To make the best of what lies within our power, and deal with everything else as it comes. — Epictetus

What is the source of our first suffering? It lies in the fact that we hesitated to speak ... it was born in the moments when we accumulated silent things within us. — Gaston Bachelard

This love, this mortal love, is of their own making," Hermes muses, "the thing we did not intend, foresee or sanction. How then should it not fascinate us? ... It is as if a fractious child had been handed a few timber shavings and a bucket of mud to keep him quiet only for him promptly to erect a cathedral ... Within the precincts of this consecrated house they afford each other sanctuary, excuse each other their failings, their sweats and smells, their lies and subterfuges, above all their ineradicable self-obsession. This is what baffles us, how they wriggled out of our grasp and somehow became free to forgive each other for all that they are not. — John Banville

The point of Jesus' existence wasn't to lessen or diminish our appreciation of each other, but to expand our appreciation of each other by reminding us what lies within all of us, because Jesus was an example of the pinnacle of human evolution. — Marianne Williamson

Once one realizes that magick works, and that it works based on scientific factors, the next step is to hone one's skill to reach repetitive success. What makes magick so interesting is that because we are individuals, the combination that unlocks the door to success will vary from person to person, yet the main thrust of the work operates on a specific set of scientific formulas that our scientists are only now beginning to fathom. The mystery, then, lies within each of us. — Silver RavenWolf

God is our true Friend, who always gives us the counsel and comfort we need. Our danger lies in resisting Him; so it is essential that we acquire the habit of hearkening to His voice, or keeping silence within, and listening so as to lose nothing of what He says to us. — Francois Fenelon

What is the best that lies within us? Of how much are we capable? None of us yet knows. An old Arabic legend tells of a rider finding a spindly sparrow lying on its back in the middle of the road. He dismounted and asked the sparrow why his feet were in the air. Replied the sparrow, "I heard the heavens were going to fall today." "And I suppose you think your puny bird legs can hold up the whole universe?" laughed the horseman. "Perhaps not," said the sparrow with conviction, "but one does whatever one can. — Jeffrey R. Holland

My Everest is not your Everest. Your Everest is not mine. We all have an Everest. Each of us. Sometimes the peak is literally Mount Everest but most times it lies deep within us, figuratively occupying a mountainous inner space. It calls us to rise up, to do what we formerly labeled as impossible, and to be who we deeply and desperately want to be. I know that I have found an Everest when my soul furiously pokes me repeatedly until I listen. Heeding this call to passionate adventure of any sort initiates a journey of intense immense proportion that changes every molecule of my being. — T.A. Loeffler

There is power in nature,' Ilgast replied, 'and what is often forgotten is that nature lies within us as much as it does out there, amidst high grasses or shoreline. To heal is to draw across the divide; that and nothing more. — Steven Erikson

We're all shaped to some degree by our own biographies and cultures and it's easy to believe that what's happened before determines what has to come next. The American poet Ralph Waldo Emerson thought otherwise. "What lies behind us," he wrote, "and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us." Finding your Element is about discovering what lies within you and, in doing so, transforming what lies before you. "Risk — Ken Robinson

What lies behind us may be mighty. What lies before us may be mightier. But what lies within us is the mightiest of all! Christ within us is the hope of Glory! — Israelmore Ayivor

Perhaps we do not yet know what the word "to love" means. There are within us lives in which we love unconsciously. To love thus means more than to have pity, to make inner sacrifices, to be anxious to help and give happiness; it is a thing that lies a thousand fathoms deeper, where our softest, swiftest, strongest words cannot reach it. At moments we might believe it to be a recollection, furtive but excessively keen, of great primitive unity. There is in this love a force that nothing can resist. — Maurice Maeterlinck

All America lies at the end of the wilderness road, and our past is not a dead past, but still lives in us. Our forefathers had civilization inside themselves, the wild outside. We live in the civilization they created, but within us the wilderness still lingers. What they dreamed, we live, and what they lived, we dream. - T. K. Whipple, Study Out the Land — Larry McMurtry

Contentment? Hmmmmmmmmm. That's a really deep one. It requires diving deep into the moment and bringing up that contentment which lies deep within us. You may want to put your life behind you so that it doesn't impede your way deeper. It's alright to do something really slowly if that's what it takes to do the thing you want to do. — Art Hochberg

Othalas: Words. What are they but shadows on a page or howling on the wind? They are as ever-changing as the mists below us and it is just as easy to lose sense of yourself among them. I am older than most sorcerers so what I know may, indeed, be close to the truth. Magic, wyrd, words, dreams, they all come from the spirit. Within them lie both power and peril. For to misuse any is to warp your sense of self. To lie in words, or in magic, or in dreams
that is how you become lost. The lights you see, they were lost long before they came to the Vale. — Robert Fanney

Each of us is allowed to revel in our own desires, no matter how dark or depraved they may seem; for we are the only ones that know what lies within our own imagination. Inside these erotic visions there is no shame -- only pleasure. It is a chance to dip a toe into something that may have only ever seemed a fleeting thought. — K. Kiker