Tom Hoffman > Tom's Quotes

“The Hero Path

We have not even to risk the adventure alone
for the heroes of all time have gone before us.
The labyrinth is thoroughly known ...
we have only to follow the thread of the hero path.
And where we had thought to find an abomination
we shall find a God.

And where we had thought to slay another
we shall slay ourselves.
Where we had thought to travel outwards
we shall come to the center of our own existence.
And where we had thought to be alone
we shall be with all the world.”
― Joseph Campbell

“Every atom, every molecule, and every bouncing marble is exactly where it should be at every moment in time.”
― Tom Hoffman, The Eleventh Ring

“The most valuable gifts in life often arrive in very strange packages.”
― Tom Hoffman, The Eleventh Ring

“Blindly reaching out for his bottle of Madame Beffy’s Headache Tonic, he knocked over a vase filled with glass marbles. They fell to the floor with a great clatter. As he watched them bouncing and skittering across the floor, he had an unexpected thought. The wild, chaotic path of the marbles was not really chaotic at all. Each marble was precisely following the known laws of physical motion. He was not witnessing chaos, but order and perfection. Each marble was exactly where it should be at every moment in time.”
― Tom Hoffman, The Eleventh Ring

“First, you may cause no harm to any living creature. All living things have the sacred life force within them. You will come to understand that the physical form of a creature makes no difference, and their behavior, whether you perceive it as good or bad, makes no difference either.”
― Tom Hoffman, The Eleventh Ring

“There was once a bunny who lived by the ocean. Every day he would stroll along the beach and pick up thoughts which had washed ashore. He would find them in shells, under rocks, and sometimes even tangled up in seaweed. "Oh, this is a good one,” he would say, “We see chaos, but if we look carefully, if we look beneath the chaos, we find order and perfection." And into his bucket the thought would go. When the bunny had reached a ripe old age he gathered all the thoughts together and placed them carefully into a large silver cauldron heated by the fires of life. Using a straw broom, he stirred them thoroughly, and as he was stirring he listened carefully. Much to his surprise he heard the ocean singing a wordless song of incomparable beauty. The bunny closed his eyes and said, “Ah, it was all worth it.”

The Blue Monk stood up. “We will sing for you now, Edmund. It is the ocean’s wordless song of incomparable beauty. It is the song of the universe, the song of your past, the song of your future.”

Edmund’s eyes were still closed when he heard the first Blue Monk sing.”
― Tom Hoffman

“For the simplicity on this side of complexity, I wouldn't give you a fig. But for the simplicity on the other side of complexity, for that I would give you anything I have.”
― Oliver Wendell Holmes

“Most of us are not raised to actively encounter our destiny. We may not know that we have one. As children, we are seldom told we have a place in life that is uniquely ours alone. Instead, we are encouraged to believe that our life should somehow fulfill the expectations of others, that we will (or should) find our satisfactions as they have found theirs. Rather than being taugh to ask ourselves who we are, we are schooled to ask others. We are, in effect, trained to listen to others' versions of ourselves. We are brought up in our life as told to us by someone else! When we survey our lives, seeking to fulfill our creativity, we often see we had a dream that went glimmering because we believed, and those around us believed, that the dream was beyond our reach. Many of us would have been, or at least might have been, done, tried something, if...
If we had known who we really were.”
― Julia Cameron

“Critics who treat 'adult' as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”
― C.S. Lewis

“The moment you chose to sacrifice your life was the moment you saved it. Rather funny when you think about it.”
― Tom Hoffman, The Eleventh Ring

“A single act of kindness can ripple across your world with a life of its own, across the fabric of space and time until it has altered beyond recognition the world you know. Treat all living creatures with kindness and respect.”
― Tom Hoffman, The Thirteenth Monk

“There was once a bunny who lived by the ocean. Every day he would stroll along the sandy beach and pick up thoughts which had washed ashore. He would find them in shells, under rocks, and sometimes even tangled up in seaweed. "Oh, this is a good one,” he would say, “We see chaos, but if we look carefully, if we look beneath the chaos, we find perfection." And into his bucket the thought would go. When the bunny had reached a ripe old age he gathered all the thoughts together and placed them carefully into a large silver cauldron heated by the fires of life. Using a straw broom, he stirred them thoroughly, and as he was stirring he listened carefully. Much to his surprise he heard the ocean singing a wordless song of incomparable beauty. The bunny closed his eyes and said, “Ah, it was all worth it.”

--The Blue Monk of Niim”
― Tom Hoffman The Seventh Key

“You are certainly aware by now there are no bad events. There are only events where the goodness within goes unrecognized by the creature experiencing it.”
― Tom Hoffman, The Thirteenth Monk