Ina > Ina's Quotes

“An education is truly “fitted for freedom” only if it is such as to produce free citizens, citizens who are free not because of wealth or birth, but because they can call their minds their own. Male and female, slave-born and freeborn, rich and poor, they have looked into themselves and developed the ability to separate mere habit and convention from what they can defend by argument. They have ownership of their own thought and speech, and this imparts to them a dignity that is far beyond the outer dignity of class and rank.”
― Martha Nussbaum

“We do not believe in ourselves until someone reveals that deep inside us something is valuable, worth listening to, worthy of our trust, sacred to our touch. Once we believe in ourselves we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight or any experience that reveals the human spirit.”
― E.E. Cummings

“It occurred to her that mercy was the ability to stop, if only for a moment. There was no mercy where there could be no stopping.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“To be a green and juicy crone comes from having lived long enough to be deeply rooted in wholehearted involvements, of living a personally meaningful life, however unique, feminist, or traditional it may appear to others. It has to do with knowing who we are inside and believing that what we are doing is a true reflection or expression of our genuine self. It is having what Margaret Mead called PMZ, or postmenopausal zest for the life you have.”
― Jean Shinoda Bolen, Goddesses in Older Women:: Archetypes in Women Over Fifty

“To be a choicemaker in the third phase means that what you choose to do or be must correspond with what is true for you at a soul level.”
― Jean Shinoda Bolen, Goddesses in Older Women:: Archetypes in Women Over Fifty

“Objective knowledge can be learned through teachers, books, or observation of something outside of ourselves. Gnostic or noetic (an alternative spelling) knowledge is what is revealed to us or intuitively perceived as spiritually true. I think of gnosis as what we “gknow” at a soul level, it’s what we know “in our bones.”
― Jean Shinoda Bolen, Goddesses in Older Women:: Archetypes in Women Over Fifty

“A person (or ego) with a connection to the Self has a sense that what she is doing with her life is meaningful. This can only be known subjectively, it is soul knowledge.”
― Jean Shinoda Bolen, Goddesses in Older Women:: Archetypes in Women Over Fifty

“What we know through a connection with the Self is divine wisdom.”
― Jean Shinoda Bolen, Goddesses in Older Women:: Archetypes in Women Over Fifty

“halves of a spiritual whole; each completed the other. She realized that “feminism catches fire when it draws upon its inherent spirituality”
― Jean Shinoda Bolen, Goddesses in Older Women:: Archetypes in Women Over Fifty

“there is no word in Hebrew for “goddess,” so the word cannot appear in the Old Testament.”
― Jean Shinoda Bolen, Goddesses in Older Women:: Archetypes in Women Over Fifty

“But curiously, even if there is no word for goddess and monotheism denies the possibility, there appears to be a goddess in the Old Testament’s Book of Proverbs. She was Chokmah in Hebrew, became Sophia in Greek, and then the abstract and neuter word “wisdom” in English. Sophia as “wisdom” in the Revised Standard Version of the Bible speaks in the first person. Her description of herself and manner of speaking are that of a divine feminine being. Her attributes are those of a goddess of wisdom. She says: “I have counsel and sound wisdom, I have insight, I have strength,”
― Jean Shinoda Bolen, Goddesses in Older Women:: Archetypes in Women Over Fifty

“Synchronicity has been defined, tongue-in-cheek, as “God acting anonymously,” which nonetheless alludes to an awe that can accompany an especially uncanny and significant synchronicity. Maybe we should think of it as “Sophia acting anonymously,” when we know through the synchronicity that there is no adequate explanation for how this could happen other than that we are part of an interconnected spiritual universe that has just shown us that we matter.”
― Jean Shinoda Bolen, Goddesses in Older Women:: Archetypes in Women Over Fifty

“Obviously, insights gained from gnosis are rarely welcomed as topics of conversation at social gatherings. To break the silence and speak about what you know to be your spiritual reality, or tell another about a numinous experience or your philosophical insights or take up a religious vocation becomes possible for many women only when they are over fifty and have found friends with spiritual depth.”
― Jean Shinoda Bolen, Goddesses in Older Women:: Archetypes in Women Over Fifty

“A younger you might have responded impulsively by letting your emotions carry you away without much thought or consideration. Those same emotions may arise, but a maturity (often having to do with being responsible for others) stops you from acting on them. You know that whatever you decide to do here matters. It is time to call on Hecate to help you see the larger picture, to stay at the crossroad until it is clear to you which path to take.”
― Jean Shinoda Bolen, Goddesses in Older Women:: Archetypes in Women Over Fifty

“Whensoever thou wilt rejoice thyself, think and meditate upon those good parts and especial gifts, which thou hast observed in any of them that live with thee: as industry in one, in another modesty, in another bountifulness, in another some other thing. For nothing can so much rejoice thee, as the resemblances and parallels”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations: By Marcus Aurelius : Illustrated & Unabridged

“meditate upon thoughts is simply to be aware, as thoughts arise, that the mind is thinking, without getting involved in the content: not going off on a train of association, not analyzing the thought and why it came, but merely to be aware that at the particular moment “thinking” is happening”
― Joseph Goldstein, The Experience of Insight: A Simple and Direct Guide to Buddhist Meditation

“So many problems in the world—political and economic tensions and hostilities—are related to the thought, “This is my nation, my country.” In understanding that the concept is only the product of our own thought processes, we can begin to free ourselves from that attachment.”
― Joseph Goldstein, The Experience of Insight: A Simple and Direct Guide to Buddhist Meditation

“We rarely see that “past” and “future” are happening right now. All that there is, is an unfolding of present moments. We have created these concepts to serve a useful purpose, but by taking the ideas to be the reality, by not understanding that they are merely the product of our own thought processes, we find ourselves burdened by worries and regrets about the past and anxieties of anticipation about what has not yet happened.”
― Joseph Goldstein, The Experience of Insight: A Simple and Direct Guide to Buddhist Meditation

“Actually, ownership is a thought process independent of the actual relationship that exists between us and objects in the world. Freeing ourselves from attachment to “ownership” frees us from our enslavement to objects.”
― Joseph Goldstein, The Experience of Insight: A Simple and Direct Guide to Buddhist Meditation

“In meditation, we free ourselves from attachment to that conceptualization and experience the fundamental unity of the elements which comprise our being.”
― Joseph Goldstein, The Experience of Insight: A Simple and Direct Guide to Buddhist Meditation

“When you close your eyes there is the breath, sensations, sounds, thoughts—where is “man” or “woman” except as an idea, a concept?”
― Joseph Goldstein, The Experience of Insight: A Simple and Direct Guide to Buddhist Meditation

“From the beginning this “self” does not exist, yet because we’re so firmly attached to the idea of it, we spend much of our lives defending or enlarging or satisfying this imaginary self. Meditation helps us to see its conceptual nature, to see that in reality it does not exist, that it is simply an idea, an extraneous projection onto what’s happening in the moment.”
― Joseph Goldstein, The Experience of Insight: A Simple and Direct Guide to Buddhist Meditation

“In psychological terms, the Buddha’s first truth, for instance, is really about the inevitability of our own humiliation. His insights challenge us to examine ourselves with a candor that we would prefer to avoid.”
― Mark Epstein, Thoughts without a Thinker: Psychotherapy from a Buddhist Perspective

“No matter what we do, he taught, we cannot sustain the illusion of our self-sufficiency. We are all subject to decay, old age, and death, to disappointment, loss, and disease.”
― Mark Epstein, Thoughts without a Thinker: Psychotherapy from a Buddhist Perspective

“We do not want to admit our lack of substance to ourselves and, instead, strive to project an image of completeness, or self-sufficiency. The paradox is that, to the extent that we succumb to this urge, we are estranged from ourselves and are not real. Our narcissism requires that we keep the truth about our selves at bay.”
― Mark Epstein, Thoughts without a Thinker: Psychotherapy from a Buddhist Perspective

“When the ego is not able to “unravel its structure,” when the capacity for love is shut down because of fear, insecurity, or confusion, then the person becomes isolated by and imprisoned in individuality. Where there is no unburdening and no rhythm of tension and relaxation, there can be no freedom to bond, no surrender of ego boundaries, and no merging of the kind that characterizes all forms of love.”
― Mark Epstein, Thoughts without a Thinker: Psychotherapy from a Buddhist Perspective