Quotes by Marianne Williamson

You must learn a new way to think before you can master a new way to be.

The practice of forgiveness is our most important contribution to the healing of the world.

Forgiveness is not always easy. At times, it feels more painful than the wound we suffered, to forgive the one that inflicted it. And yet, there is no peace without forgiveness.

Certainly there is such a thing as chemical depression, and for that, obviously, there are issues that psychotherapists are much more expert at speaking to, but I think there is a low-grade depression that actually prevails in our society. And most of us feel it.

Politics should not be the least heart-filled thing we do, it should be the most heart-filled thing we do.

If you give your life as a wholehearted response to love, then love will wholeheartedly respond to you.

Politics is in a crisis because it's separated from our deep humanity.

War is just an effect, not a cause.

If I choose to bless another person, I will always end up feeling more blessed.

The first step in forgiveness is the willingness to forgive.

Revolutions are not easy.

And as we let our own light shine we unconsciously give other people the permission to do the same.

Attack thoughts towards others are attack thoughts towards ourselves.

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 frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be.

Everything we do is infused with the energy with which we do it. If we're frantic, life will be frantic. If we're peaceful, life will be peaceful.

Every moment is an invitation to live out of your weakness or to live out of your strength.

We are not held back by the love we didn't receive in the past,
but by the love we're not extending in the present.

Bless more blame less.

The spiritual path is simply the journey of living our lives. Everyone is on a spiritual path; most people just don't know it.

The real axis of social change is not horizontal, but vertical. We don't need a whole bunch of people gathering to think shallow thoughts together. What we need is for as many people as are ready to gather and think deep thoughts together.

Until we have met the monsters in ourselves, we keep trying to slay them in the outer world.

When I went to college in the 1970s, the Women's Liberation movement was all the buzz.

Divine organization is inherent in all things.

I now see that is a woman's God-given role to tend to the home and take care of the children: it's just that the entire planet is our home, and every child on it is one of our children.

I place my life in the hands of God each day. And I trust that He knows what He's doing, even when I do not.

Anyone who isn't confused or conflicted on the topic of Israel probably isn't looking into it too deeply.

Old systems do not fold willingly, particularly when they control gargantuan amounts of wealth and power. But like empires of old -- from the Romans to the Hapsburgs to the colonial British -- even the largest do fall.

Pray for Trump's sanity and clarity, because his power to cause real damage to our country is enormous.

Donald Trump is an innocent child of God, and the democratically chosen president-elect of the United States. We must deeply bow before the first and deeply respect the second.

Political propaganda seeks to affect the way people perceive the world in order to affect the way they behave.

The struggle between Israelis and Palestinians is a perfect reflection of the struggle between fear and forgiveness that rages within us all.

I try to remind myself not to go anywhere or do anything without asking for spiritual direction through prayer and meditation.

The purpose of prayer is the alignment of the mind with the thoughts and the will of God.

Enlightenment is the only real antidote to the world's despair.

Love is what we are born with. Fear is what we learn.

Real love is comforting, to be sure, but not always at first.

Life is a book that never ends. Chapters close, but not the book itself. The end of one physical incarnation is like the end of a chapter, on some level setting up the beginning of another.

Where there is peace, there cannot be chaos; the two cannot coexist at the same time.

Once the light of our awareness is cast on any darkness, then it cannot hide and it cannot remain. Such is the law of consciousness.

We must keep in mind that where the road is crooked, God makes it straight, and where our hearts are wounded, God makes us whole. As we open our hearts in purity and simplicity, admitting to God that we are completely powerless in the area of our problem, His illumination redeems us.

You will fear the darkness only to the extent that you yourself are not providing light.

You've done the bourgeois thing, perhaps, but let's not call that love.

Living in this world, under the dominance of the ego mind, is difficult. That's the struggle.

God is the electricity and we are the lamps.

The only real failure is the failure to grow from what we go through.

I also think the women's movement has unintentionally contributed to the dishonoring of motherhood. It happened because we made such a big deal about our right to go out into the world.

Most women I know are priestesses and healers, although many don't know it yet, and some never will. We are all of us sisters of a mysterious order.

A tulip doesn't strive to impress anyone.

It doesn't struggle to be different than a rose.

It doesn't have to.

It is different.

And there's room in the garden for every flower.

The concept of a divine, or 'Christ'-mind, is the idea that, at our core, we are not just identical, but actually the same being.

If we do not like what we see in the world, we must face what we don't like in ourselves. As we change, the world will change with us.

The miracle is when you shift. The miracle is when you know there is no hill -- you're removing the hill. The miracle is when you realize the time of physical decline can be a time of spiritual incline.

Imagine everything you're experiencing now being a hundred times more wonderful. Bad turns good; good turns great. That is what is possible.

Imagine the week ahead unfolding in an ever-increasing flow of miracles. Allow the image to sink into your heart. Receive it with a big yes!

The key to intimacy is the commitment to honesty and to the radical forgiveness necessary in order for honesty to be safe.

The greatest force of personal liberation is the decision to widen our circle of compassion, moving from focus on self to focus on service.

Mary's was a virgin birth, and the word virgin means a woman unto herself. The actualized woman is powerful unto herself and gives birth to things divine. Today we have the chance to give birth to a healed and transformed world.

Generation after generation can't just be loaded with more and more nuclear weapons and not ultimately dance to that music.

Today is a day for sober and mature reflection, not glee. Mindless celebration is both spiritually inappropriate and politically naive.

We cannot get to our knowledge because the world is too loud. And we tend to make it louder as we cry out in pain, pretending we are singing.

I think future generations will see the invention of the Internet as having been as important as the invention of the printing press. It's the democratizing tool of all tools. As long as no one can control the flow of information, then freedom always has a chance.

No matter what I go through today, I need not fear. For God is all-powerful and God is here. I am never separate from the One who created me. There is nothing I can do to make Him turn his face away from me. I am loved, I am cared for, and I am totally safe in the arms of God.

Forgiveness is 'selective remembering' -- a conscious decision to focus on love and let the rest go.

We need not wait for the world to become more mystical; the world is mystical. Our problem is not that the world lacks magic; our problem is that we don't believe in its magic. We do not show up fully for life, and then wonder why life is not showing up more fully for us.

Choosing joy involves spiritual surrender, and sometimes we would rather hold on to the pain than surrender our egos.

The moment of surrender is not when life is over. It's when it begins.

King Solomon, who supposedly was the wisest of all men, described his youth as his winter and his advanced years as his summer. We can be older than we used to be yet feel much younger than we are.

The world is terrified of joyful women. Make a stand. Be one anyway.

If we never take a risk, we'll never know the parts of ourselves that would have emerged if we had.

I used to feel like I was waiting for someone to discover me, to 'produce' me, like Lana Turner at the drugstore. Utlimately I realized that the person I was waiting for was myself. If we wait for the world's permission to shine, we will never receive it.

It is our own thoughts that hold the key to miraculous transformation.

I am a student of universal spiritual principles, and I read theology and spiritual writings, so my grasp of basic spiritual principles is fairly good.

Love is a wave flowing in the direction of bliss for all living things. It will carry you if you allow it to flow through you.

My hope is that I'm getting better and wiser. With every book, I have more of myself to pour onto the page.

The Queen is coming to reclaim her girls.

We can't look to the world to restore our worth; we're here to restore our worth to the world. The world outside us can reflect our glory, but it cannot create it. It cannot crown us. Only God can crown us, and he already has.

When a woman gives birth, two are born: a baby from the womb of its mother and a woman from the womb of her former existence.

Be the most wonderful expression of you that you're capable of.

We need more than a new politics; what we need is a new worldview. We need a fundamentally different bottom line.

The Republican corporatists are worse than the Democratic corporatists, but only to a degree. And Republican corporatists are at least true to their principles, however abhorrent those principles might be to some of us.

We want spiritual principles to be more than beautiful abstractions; we want them to actually transform our lives.

Love is not neutral. It takes a stand. It is a commitment to the attainment of the conditions of peace for everyone involved in a situation.

The places in our personality where we tend to deviate from love are not out faults, but our wounds. God doesn't want to punish us, but to heal us. And that is how He wishes us to view the wounds in other people.

The spiritual commitment is to make every situation an object of devotional connection.

In our ability to think about something differently lies the power to make it different.

Sex is not the ultimate high, but the ultimate high hangs out around sex. The ultimate high is the dance with another person, played so deep down and with such abandon that glee returns to grown-ups.

For a society as abundant and as blessed as ours, to have as many disadvantaged children as we have does not bode well for our long-term economic future.

I feel that if your soul was branded by the sixties, you never lost the brand. It's like going into a nightclub and having your hand stamped so that you don't have to come back but you can come back.

The universe is conspiring at this moment to bring you happiness and peace.

Corporate totalitarianism means total control by corporate interests. If they want a war, they get a war. If they want GMOs, they get GMOs. If they want fracking, they get fracking. If they want big banks to control our monetary policy, big banks control our monetary policy.

I see the universe as naturally and infinitely self-correcting.

The universe is not only self-organizing, it is also self-correcting.

A level of anxiety and tension and outright fear that so many people have felt, not only during the recession but during this slow economic recovery since. This made me very much want to up the conversation about how miracle-minded thinking applies to that area of life.

Without nourishing our own souls, we can't nourish the world, for we cannot give what we do not have. As we attend to our souls, we emanate invisibly and involuntarily the light we have received.

The sense of endings as well as beginnings in the air is now so obvious in so many dimensions of our experience that a critical mass has been reached.

Think of the mystical three days between the crucifixion and the resurrection as the time it takes for a situation to change once spirit has infused our consciousness. As we come to look at an experience differently, in time in begins to transform.

The gap is not between knowing it and living it, it's between knowing it and living it consistently. You know, we've all had moments when we got it right. Most of us have moments when we get it right every day. The trouble is getting it right when a curve-ball comes at us.

Whatever we put out, it's coming back to us. The universe keeps a perfect set of books.

I feel that as women we've allowed ourselves to be deluded by certain ideas that hold us back, such as the over-glorification of masculine consciousness.

The world we knew as children is still buried within our minds. Our childlike self is the deepest level of our being. It is who we really are, and what is real doesn't go away.

Fuzzy thinking is, after all, just one step above not thinking at all. But to take the ideas of serious transformational thinkers and philosophers and throw the new age label at them is also abhorrent.

There are two distinctly, almost surreally different narratives in Israel and Palestine... and to a great extent, both are right and both are wrong. Both peoples have suffered greatly and both have legitimate grievances against the other.

As long as we remain vigilant at building our internal abundance--an abundance of integrity, an abundance of forgiveness, an abundance of service, an abundance of love--then external lack is bound to be temporary.

No conventional therapy can release us from a deep and abiding psychic pain. Through prayer we find what we cannot find elsewhere: a peace that is not of this world.

We aren't bodies at all; who we are is the love inside us, and it is that love alone that determines our value. When our minds are filled with light, there is no room for darkness.

I had an experience that probably is shared by many parents. When my daughter was born, I felt viscerally connected to generations before and after me in a way that took me by surprise.

I think we all need to be looking to the better angels of our own selves. We don't need to be looking for great people so much as becoming great people.

I find being a mother harder than I though it was going to be. That is a tremendous revelation for me personally. Much more time, more care, more attention and more effort needs to be spent on care for the children. That will save the world at large.

At midlife, you're pregnant with the best self you can be -- someone who has learned enough from both successes and failures to add up to a fine human being.

If we only identify with the mortal world, then we identify with a level of scarcity and lack and brokenness, and that will be our experience.

I've come to trust not that events will always unfold exactly as I want, but that I will be fine either way. The challenges we face in life are always lessons that serve our soul's growth.

You are emerging from the cocoon of your former self. There are no limits to the extent of the transformation that's possible for you.

As difficult as it can be to find genuine inner calm, it is the key to creating peace in the world as we know it. The world will not change until we do, and there is nothing the world can deliver to us that will give us the peace we crave. Peace comes not from the world, but from God.

People hear you on the level you speak to them from. Speak from your heart, and they will hear with theirs.

First there was the word. A Course in Miracles says that prayer is the medium of miracles. It's the realm of thought where we are aligned with the thought of God and therefore in a co- creative mode. It's where we surrender our minds to His mind and become empowered.

A Course in Miracles tells us that although 'we think that without the ego, all would be chaos, the opposite is true. Without the ego, all would be love.'

Conscious awareness is the source of our healing...Only when you say the truth can the truth set you free. This is not a negative process, but at times it is a difficult process.

The purpose of daily prayer is the cultivation of a sense of the sacred. Sacred energy renews us.

Our career is not something that we go out and *find.* Your perfect career is something that emerges from deep within you. When you are aligned with the truth within yourself, then you magnetize people and circumstances which align with that truth.

The deepest feelings always show themselves in silence.

If you think humanity can get itself out of all this mess without divine help, then you're not being hopeful -- you're hallucinating.

If we had the government we deserved we would have the most righteous government, because we deserve the best -- everybody does.

You're on this earth with a divine purpose: to rise to the level of your highest creative possibility, expressing all that you are intellectually, emotionally, psychologically, and physically in order to make the universe a more beautiful place.

Instead of praying: 'Dear God, bring me someone fabulous,' try: 'Dear God, make me into someone fabulous.'

Dear God, I surrender this thought to you, for I would see the miracle that lies behind it. Amen.

There is a point at which we begin to receive a diminishing return on the accumulation of sacred knowledge unless we use it to at least try to improve the world.

Do not fear. Look beyond what's dying to what's being born.

Angels light the way. Angels do not begrudge anyone anything, angels do not tear down, angels do not compete, angels do not constrict their hearts, angels do not fear. That's why they sing and that's how they fly. We, of course, are only angels in disguise.

We need more than new policies. We need a new worldview, and a new bottom line. We need to replace economic values as our ordering principle, with humanitarian values as our ordering principle.

In the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., No lie will last forever. We have to work at removing lies from our own hearts. And on the national level, we do this not because we blame our country, but because we love it.

If our emotional stability is based on what other people do or do not do, then we have no stability. If our emotional stability is based on love that is changeless and unalterable, then we attain the stability of God.

Miracles occur naturally as expressions of love. When you choose to love, you choose to work miracles.

The past doesn't determine your future unless you carry it with you into the present. Forgiving yourself and others, you free the universe to begin again at any moment.

Until we have seen someone's darkness, we don't really know who they are. Until we have forgiven someone's darkness, we don't really know what love is.

Part of forgiving people is releasing them from our own agendas.

So it is that a new politics centers around the arousal of that power, using prayer and meditation to create a force field of transformation.

You can live in your total potential creative capacity in an instant-with your heart open to give and receive love.

What the ego doesn't want us to see is that our pain doesn't come from the love we weren't given in the past, but from the love we ourselves aren't giving in the present.

To the ego mind, surrender means giving up. To the spiritual mind, surrender means giving in and receiving.

Every ending is a new beginning. Through the grace of God, we can always start again. (Page 120.).

America is a great country, and we've done a lot of good in the world. But we are a collection of people, not saints. We have our own sins to atone for.

Give all your gifts away in service to the world.  If you want to paint, don't wait for a grant, paint a wall in your town that looks drab and uninviting.  You never know who is going to see that wall. Whatever it is you want to do, give it away in service to your community.

Once we truly understand that God's will is that we be happy, we no longer feel the need to ask for anything other than that God's will be done.

In every heart there is an inner room, where we can hold our greatest treasures and our deepest pain.

The universe is intentional. It is always moving in the direction of greater love, regardless whether or not we consciously align with that love.

Love will not just heal your life or mine. Love will heal the world.

A hero is someone who stands in the community and speaks their hopes and speaks their passion. That's almost an act of heroism nowadays because higher consciousness is so trivialized.

Every bird that sings, sings for you. Every breeze that blows, blows for you. Every sunray shines for you. If you only knew how loved you are.

You have to make a space in your heart, in your mind and in your life itself for authentic human connection.

I'm better than I used to be.
Better than I was yesterday.
But hopefully
not as good as I'll be tomorrow.

The opportunities for infinite possibility exist no matter what age we are.

Imagine that anything is possible, and name the most amazing thing that could happen in 2013.

The problem with most intimate relationships is that they are not romantic. They do not involve a deeper knowing, and thus there is diminished possibility of sacred, transformative sharing.

It takes mystical insight to see the beauty and innocence in each other, even when that is not what we are showing to the world. That is why God is needed in intimate relationships, to move us beyond the perceptions that can so often poison love.

I'm certainly not saying anything new, and I'm not even saying anything all that different from what everyone else I know is saying right now -- I'm saying what millions of people are saying. I'm just saying it publicly.

The key to happiness is the decision to be happy.

Every aspect of life is pre-programmed to rise to its highest creative possibility. We don't have to make that happen, but we have to allow it to happen. And that itself is the struggle of life: resisting the resistant mind.

When we stay close to the wisdom of our knowing, seeking solutions to our problems in the sanctuary of the heart and not in the vanity of the mind, then we can pretty much trust in the unfolding, mysterious wisdom of life.

Yes, hardships come. But I see in my life and in the lives of others how often something that does not have to be held as a hardship is dealt with by the mind as though it is.

I was very much a child of the 1960s. I protested the Vietnam War and grew up in a fairly politicized home. My father was like a cross between William Kunstler and Zorba the Greek. I grew up among left-wing lawyers.

We are to love our enemies that they might be returned to their right minds.

We need to change society's ordering principle from economic to humanitarian values, from money as the bottom line to love as the bottom line.

There is no greater gift to future generations than that we do the work God has asked us to do: love one another, that the world might be made right.

If you allow yourself to deepen with midlife, your experience of everything deepens, including your experience of God.

I don't believe the United States is going through a midlife crisis. The United States is going through an adolescent crisis.

The masculine DOES while the feminine IS. Major in the feminine, but minor in the masculine.

We are likely to feel better when we go to bed tonight if we have an internal sense that we spent our lives meaningfully today.

No matter what the problem, a miracle can solve it. Remember to ask for one.

When you understand the law of divine compensation, you realize that in the presence of spiritual consciousness, there is more than enough compensation for any diminishment in materiality.

The love within us is meant to extend outward. The closer we grow to our inner light, we feel a natural urge to share it. We all long for meaningful work, some creative endeavor that will be our ministry, by which the energies within us might flow out to help heal the world.

Until we see love as the meaning of life, life seems to have no meaning at all. The sense of meaninglessness produces chaos, and the chaos produces fear. There is only one way out of this, and that is to see every moment and every situation as an invitation to love.

Our most meaningful conversations go on late at night when we're on the phone with our friends or talking to our lovers.

Nothing that happened before this moment has any power over you whatsoever, except to the extent to which you carry it into this moment. Dwell in the present with full forgiveness of yourself and others, and your life will be lifted to divine right order...perfection, prosperity and peace.

When infants aren't held, they can become sick, even die. It's universally accepted that children need love, but at what age are people supposed to stop needing it? We never do. We need love in order to live happily, as much as we need oxygen in order to live at all.

I think moral outrage is born not of anger but of love. It comes from the highest in us, not from a low-level sense of anger or cynicism.

If you have a longing in your heart to hear a deeper truth, there's a mysterious way in which that truth will find you.

Citizens should be looked to for what they can give of their own nobility, virtue, creative thinking, passion, and natural talent for community building and relating to others.

Motherly love -- putting the care of children before every other consideration -- is the ultimate intelligence of nature.

Joy is our goal, our destiny. We cannot know who we are except in joy. Not knowing joy, we do not know ourselves.

Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous?

Angels are thoughts of God -- to pray to an angel is to look to a level of pure thinking, divine thinking, and to ask that it replace our thoughts of fear.

There are other kinds of emotional pain that emerge from our own mistaken thinking. As we surrender that pain, we are inviting into our thought system a guide who will lead us to different thoughts. It's like the song Amazing Grace: I was blind and now I see.

Go forth in confidence and go forth in peace. For there are angels to your left and angels to your right; angels in front of you and angels behind you; angels above you and angels below. You are loved, and you are not alone.

Whatever situation you're in: Send love, place it in God's hands, open your heart to everyone involved -- and it will turn out miraculously.

Everything we do is infused with the energy with which we do it. If we're frantic, life will be frantic. If we're peaceful, life will be peaceful. And so our goal in any situation becomes inner peace.

Fear unchecked grows exponentially. Love poured forth has the power to remove it. Thus is the power of God in our lives.

The return to love is hardly the end of life's adventure.  It's the real beginning.  A course in miracle says we think we have many different problems but we really only have one:  denying love is the only problem and embracing it is the only answer.

When the wisdom of the heart replaces the chatter of the mind, The power of Love flows forth.

Magic happens when you tell the universe what you want it to do for you; miracles happen when you ask how you can be of service to the universe.

My biggest past mistakes have been when I made decisions out of ego rather than spirit. When I acted too quickly. When I wasn't contemplative or reflective or prayerful enough, and I ended up making what I would only later see to be unwise decisions.

It takes great courage and personal strength to hold on to our center during times of great hurt. It takes wisdom to understand that our reactiveness only fans the flames of false drama.

I don't think pain is a prerequisite for growth, but on the other hand, most of us choose very painful ways to learn.

Hope is born of participation in hopeful solutions.

I do believe 50 is the new 40 and 60 is the new 50. Hell, maybe 60 can be the new 40, I don't know. I believe that when we give ourselves permission, we can live with an excitement and heat and passion that most women in previous generations were unable to attain.

You don't want to try to protect yourself from the pain of a crisis. You want to learn everything you can from it.

We shouldn't come up with a pseudo-spiritual excuse for turning away from the pain of the world.

Fear is a psychic tyrant that has no intention of letting its slave go free. It will say whatever it needs to say to confuse your thinking... It will always seek to preserve itself.

I tell my mother I went to God in spite of my religious education. I feel that my religious education was inadequate, but that doesn't mean that Judaism was inadequate.

A long-term romance is like a rose bush. In any given season, a blossom might fall off. But if the plant is well nourished, then the season will come around again, and new blossoms appear.

We have great power to affect the attitudes and behavior of the people around us, at work and at home. We have the power to set a tone of honor, to create an energy around ourselves that says, 'I respect myself. I respect you. Let's respect each other.'