The Soul of Money Quotes

“For me, and for many of us, our first waking thought of the day is "I didnt get enough sleep." The next one is "I don't have enough time." Whether true or not, that thought of not enough occurs to us automatically before we even think to question or examine it. We spend most of the hours and the days of our lives hearing, explaining, complaining, or worrying about what we don't have enough of... Before we even sit up in bed, before our feet touch the floor, we're already inadequate, already behind, already losing, already lacking something. And by the time we go to bed at night, our minds are racing with a litany of what we didn't get, or didn't get done, that day. We go to sleep burdened by those thoughts and wake up to that reverie of lack... This internal condition of scarcity, this mind-set of scarcity, lives at the very heart of our jealousies, our greed, our prejudice, and our arguments with life”
― Lynne Twist, The Soul of Money: Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Life

“Money is like water. It can be a conduit for commitment, a currency of love. Money moving in the direction of our highest commitments nourishes our world and ourselves. What you appreciate appreciates. When you make a difference with what you have, it expands. Collaboration creates prosperity. True abundance flows from enough; never from more. Money carries our intention. If we use it with integrity, then it carries integrity forward. Know the flow—take responsibility for the way your money moves in the world. Let your soul inform your money and your money express your soul. Access your assets—not only money but also your own character and capabilities, your relationships and other nonmoney resources. We”
― Lynne Twist, The Soul of Money: Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Life

“When we believe there is not enough, that resources are scarce, then we accept that some will have what they need and some will not. We rationalize that someone is destined to end up with the short end of the stick.”
― Lynne Twist, The Soul of Money: Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Life

“A favorite Sufi poem, attributed to Hazrat Inayat Khan, offers a helpful perspective: I asked for strength and God gave me difficulties to make me strong. I asked for wisdom and God gave me problems to learn to solve. I asked for prosperity and God gave me a brain and brawn to work. I asked for courage and God gave me dangers to overcome. I asked for love and God gave me people to help. I asked for favours and God gave me opportunities. I received nothing I wanted. I received everything I needed.”
― Lynne Twist, The Soul of Money: Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Life

“Rarely in our life is money a place of genuine freedom, joy, or clarity, yet we routinely allow it to dictate the terms of our lives and often to be the single most important factor in the decisions we make about work, love, family, and friendship.”
― Lynne Twist, The Soul of Money: Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Life

“Money is like water. It can be a conduit for commitment, a currency of love. Money moving in the direction of our highest commitments nourishes our world and ourselves. What you appreciate appreciates. When you make a difference with what you have, it expands. Collaboration creates prosperity. True abundance flows from enough; never from more. Money carries our intention. If we use it with integrity, then it carries integrity forward. Know the flow—take responsibility for the way your money moves in the world. Let your soul inform your money and your money express your soul. Access your assets—not only money but also your own character and capabilities, your relationships and other nonmoney resources. We each have the power to shift, change, and create the conversation that shapes our circumstances. The levers and dials of conversation are ours to use. When we listen, speak, and respond from the context of sufficiency, we access a new freedom and power in our relationship with money and life.”
― Lynne Twist, The Soul of Money: Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Life

“Money itself isn’t the problem. Money itself isn’t bad or good. Money itself doesn’t have power or not have power. It is our interpretation of money, our interaction with it, where the real mischief is and where we find the real opportunity for self-discovery and personal transformation.”
― Lynne Twist, The Soul of Money: Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Life

“Absent the commitment to confront the challenges we face together as a human community, charity doesn’t solve problems. It separates us from the problem temporarily and gets us off the hook.”
― Lynne Twist, The Soul of Money: Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Life

“We find sufficiency and sustainable prosperity when we think of our resources as a flow that is meant to be shared, when we put our full attention on making a difference with what we have, and when we partner with others in ways that expand and deepen that experience.”
― Lynne Twist, The Soul of Money: Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Life

“For me, that translated into fund-raising. I knew that I could and I would raise any amount of money to get that job done. Fund-raising to end hunger wasn’t just a job or a fad or a political statement for me. It was an expression of my own soulful commitment, and as such, I could only do it in a way that would call on people to reconnect with their own higher calling, or soulful longing, to be the kind of people they wanted to be, the kind of difference they wanted to make, and see how they could express that with their money. So rather than feeling that fund-raising was a matter of twisting arms for a donation or playing on emotions to manipulate money from contributors, it became for me an arena in which I was able to create an opportunity for people to engage in their greatness. It was in this soul-searching dimension of fund-raising, in these intimate conversations, that I discovered deep wounds and conflicts in the way people related to their money. Many people felt they had sold out and become someone they didn’t like anymore. Some were forcing themselves to do work that wasn’t meaningful. Many felt enslaved by their experience of being overtaxed by their government, or felt beaten down by their boss or by the burden of running a family business or employing others. Their relationship with money was dead—or, more accurately, dread—and there was hurt there. There was resentment. There were painful compromises, a kind of rawness. People were bruised and battered there. Not everyone, but many people were very unsettled and uncomfortable and just not their best selves in their relationship with money. They felt little or no freedom with money, no matter how much they had. This lackluster relationship with money wasn’t for lack of expert advice or practical tips. Money-management strategies were plentiful, but the concept of personal transformation was a stranger there. What became clear was that when people were able to align their money with their deepest, most soulful interests and commitments, their relationship with money became a place where profound and lasting transformation could occur.”
― Lynne Twist, The Soul of Money: Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Life

“When we are focused constantly on the next thing—the next dress, the next car, the next job, the next vacation, the next home improvement—we hardly experience the gifts of that which we have now.”
― Lynne Twist, The Soul of Money: Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Life

“There’s not enough becomes the reason we do work that brings us down or the reason we do things to each other that we’re not proud of. There’s not enough generates a fear that drives us to make sure that we’re not the person, or our loved ones aren’t the people, who get crushed, marginalized, or left out.”
― Lynne Twist, The Soul of Money: Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Life

“We scramble or race to “get what’s ours.” We often grow selfish, greedy, petty, fearful, or controlling, or sometimes confused, conflicted, or guilty. We see ourselves as winners or losers, powerful or helpless, and we let those labels deeply define us in ways that are inaccurate, as if financial wealth and control indicate innate superiority, and lack of them suggests a lack of worth or basic human potential.”
― Lynne Twist, The Soul of Money: Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Life

“life.”
― Lynne Twist, The Soul of Money: Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Life

“Who do I need to be to fulfill on the commitment I’ve made? What kind of human being do I need to forge myself into to make this happen? What resources do I need to be willing to bring to bear in myself and my colleagues and in my world?”
― Lynne Twist, The Soul of Money: Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Life

“We have to be willing to let go of that’s just the way it is, even if just for a moment, to consider the possibility that there isn’t a way it is or way it isn’t. There is the way we choose to act and what we choose to make of circumstances.”
― Lynne Twist, The Soul of Money: Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Life

“Contemporary European author, Bernard Lietaer, former senior officer of the Belgian Central Bank and one of the chief architects of the Euro currency, in his book, Of Human Wealth, says that greed and fear of scarcity are programmed; they do not exist in nature, not even in human nature.”
― Lynne Twist, The Soul of Money: Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Life

“When you know with certainty that things can be not just different but entirely resolved, you engage in the work in a more fundamental way. You don’t wonder “if.” You determine “how to.” You look at root causes. You make different choices.”
― Lynne Twist, The Soul of Money: Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Life

“We realized that our previous scramble to accumulate and upgrade everything about ourselves and our life was another kind of hunger, and we addressed it head-on by realizing that what we really hungered for was to have lives of meaning. We hungered to make a difference and began to devote ourselves to doing that. Some of us turned our energies to hunger initiatives, some to education, some to poverty, some to stopping abuse or providing shelter and healing for victims of abuse.”
― Lynne Twist, The Soul of Money: Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Life

“For me, and for many of us, our first waking thought of the day is "I didn't get enough sleep." The next one is "I don't have enough time." Whether true or not, that thought of not enough occurs to us automatically before we ever think to question or examine it. We spend most of the hours and the days of our lives hearing, explaining, complaining, or worrying about what we don't have enough of... We don't have enough exercise. We don't have enough work. We don't have enough profits. We don't have enough power. We don't have enough wilderness. We don't have enough weekends. Of course, we don't have enough money -- ever.
We're not thin enough, we're not smart enough, we're not pretty enough or fit enough or educated or successful enough, or rich enough -- ever. Before we even sit up in bed, before our feet touch the floor, we're already inadequate, already behind, already losing, already lacking something. And by the time we go to bed at night, our minds race with a litany of what we didn't get, or didn't get done, that day. We go to sleep burdened by those thoughts and wake up to the reverie of lack... What begins as a simple expression of the hurried life, or even the challenged life, grows into the great justification for an unfulfilled life.”
― Lynne Twist, The Soul of Money: Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Life

“In the pursuit of more we overlook the fullness and completeness that are already within us waiting to be discovered.”
― Lynne Twist, The Soul of Money: Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Life

“In our relationship with money, more is better distracts us from living more mindfully and richly with what we have.”
― Lynne Twist, The Soul of Money: Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Life

“The second toxic myth is that more is better. More of anything is better than what we have. It’s the logical response if you fear there’s not enough, but more is better drives a competitive culture of accumulation, acquisition, and greed that only heightens fears and quickens the pace of the race.”
― Lynne Twist, The Soul of Money: Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Life

“Myths and superstitions have power over us only to the extent that we believe them, but when we believe, we live completely under their spell”
― Lynne Twist, The Soul of Money: Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Life

“I challenge you to move the resources that flow through your life toward your highest commitments and ideals, those things you stand for. I challenge you to hold money as a common trust that we’re all responsible for using in ways that nurture and empower us, and all life, our planet, and all future generations. I challenge you to imbue your money with soul—your soul—and let it stand for who you are, your love, your heart, your word, and your humanity.”
― Lynne Twist, The Soul of Money: Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Life

“Collaboration leads us to and grounds us in sufficiency.”
― Lynne Twist, The Soul of Money: Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Life

“The kinds of connections that truly protect and preserve us are those that emerge from the context of sufficiency and the sharing, diversity, reciprocity, and partnership found there.”
― Lynne Twist, The Soul of Money: Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Life

“Before we even sit up in bed, before our feet touch the floor, we’re already inadequate, already behind, already losing, already lacking something. And by the time we go to bed at night, our minds race with a litany of what we didn’t get, or didn’t get done, that day. We go to sleep burdened by those thoughts and wake up to that reverie of lack.”
― Lynne Twist, The Soul of Money: Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Life

“asked for wisdom and God gave me problems to learn to solve. I asked for prosperity and God gave me a brain and brawn to work. I asked for courage and God gave me dangers to overcome. I asked for love and God gave me people to help. I asked for favours and God gave me opportunities. I received nothing I wanted. I received everything I needed.”
― Lynne Twist, The Soul of Money: Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Life

“Your relationship with money can be a place where you bring your strengths and skills, your highest aspirations, and your deepest and most profound qualities. Whether we are millionaires or “dollar heirs,” we can actually be great with our money and be great in our relationship with it.”
― Lynne Twist, The Soul of Money: Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Life