Dark Nights of the Soul Quotes

“It is precisely because we resist the darkness in ourselves that we miss the depths of the loveliness, beauty, brilliance, creativity, and joy that lie at our core.”
― Thomas Moore, Dark Nights of the Soul: A Guide to Finding Your Way Through Life's Ordeals

“During the dark night there is no choice but to surrender control, give in to unknowing, and stop and listen to whatever signals of wisdom might come along. It’s a time of enforced retreat and perhaps unwilling withdrawal. The dark night is more than a learning experience; it’s a profound initiation into a realm that nothing in the culture, so preoccupied with external concerns and material success, prepares you for.”
― Thomas Moore, Dark Nights of the Soul: A Guide to Finding Your Way Through Life's Ordeals

“That is the point of the night sea journey—to be born into yourself. There, you are in the amniotic fluid, in an alchemical substance once again. You are journeying toward your own life. You are preparing for your fate. The promise is exhilarating, but the dangers are extreme. You have to avoid being just one of the crowd and instead take the chance of being born an individual. Jonah”
― Thomas Moore, Dark Nights of the Soul: A Guide to Finding Your Way Through Life's Ordeals

“Part of the pain of love is that no person, however suitable and satisfying, completes the desire for love. There is always a remainder, because love takes us beyond the human sphere. It puts you in touch with the ultimate object of desire. It invites you to transcend yourself, to be more than you ever have been.”
― Thomas Moore, Dark Nights of the Soul: A Guide to Finding Your Way Through Life's Ordeals

“Think of all the males and females of the animal and plant world, all the opposites in every aspect of life. They all need to be “married” in some fashion to promote life. Your marriage participates in this cosmic pattern and has a wealth of meaning that you will never grasp. When you make a sacrifice, you don’t just give something up, you acknowledge a realm greater than yourself. “Sacrifice” means “to make sacred.” You go beyond self. You make room for a greater mystery. You may experience this larger sense of sacrifice in ordinary deprivations, as you give up many freedoms and soften your willfulness.”
― Thomas Moore, Dark Nights of the Soul: A Guide to Finding Your Way Through Life's Ordeals

“A philosophy of life is a bundle of wisdom you have gathered from your reading and experience. It is not a rigid ideology that allows no development and complexity. It’s a living thing, a developing idea about life that belongs to you alone.”
― Thomas Moore, Dark Nights of the Soul: A Guide to Finding Your Way Through Life's Ordeals

“Each that we lose takes part of us; A crescent still abides, Which like the moon, some turbid night, Is summoned by the tides.7”
― Thomas Moore, Dark Nights of the Soul: A Guide to Finding Your Way Through Life's Ordeals

“If you are highly neurotic, or worse, you don’t have to become normal and healthy to live a creative and loving life. You can learn to transform your insanity into eccentricity.”
― Thomas Moore, Dark Nights of the Soul: A Guide to Finding Your Way Through Life's Ordeals

“You have to make your own world, instead of succumbing to the one that presses on you. You have to turn the tables on what appears to be fate or the full weight of society. Against the greatest odds, you have to keep your wits about you and refuse to surrender to anyone or anything less than divine.”
― Thomas Moore, Dark Nights of the Soul: A Guide to Finding Your Way Through Life's Ordeals

“It isn’t comfortable to discover her place and her necessity. And yet what she has to offer is nothing less than the entire deep spiritual realm of the soul, the invisible, unchanging core.”
― Thomas Moore, Dark Nights of the Soul: A Guide to Finding Your Way Through Life's Ordeals

“People are always on the cusp between clarity and fog. Pure unreasonableness lies like a shadow at the edge of all transactions. You may wish things were simpler, but they aren’t. Your only recourse is to take into account at least a moderate degree of madness in every situation you encounter”
― Thomas Moore, Dark Nights Of The Soul: A guide to finding your way through life's ordeals

“You are always being born, always dying to the day to find the restorative waters of night.”
― Thomas Moore, Dark Nights of the Soul: A Guide to Finding Your Way Through Life's Ordeals

“Today, with a therapeutic mindset, we no longer appreciate initiations and passages. We expect people to deal with change, and if they fail, we provide them with therapy. We lack powerful communal rituals that would offer support and guidance. Our developmental models of a human life account for progress but not major shifts in being. Linear thinking, so much a part of modern life, affects the way we understand our very lives. We evolve and develop, but we don’t transform. We imagine growing like a skyscraper under construction, reaching to the sky, not like a caterpillar turning into a butterfly.”
― Thomas Moore, Dark Nights of the Soul: A Guide to Finding Your Way Through Life's Ordeals

“Poetry is sea-language; it keeps you in the water of your life as it articulates your experience.”
― Thomas Moore, Dark Nights of the Soul: A Guide to Finding Your Way Through Life's Ordeals

“of what you so strongly desire. No one gives you a sense of security. You have to get it for yourself, mainly by living your own life with enthusiasm and by learning to love yourself. How will you get to this point of feeling secure and loved? Probably through a real dark night of the soul.”
― Thomas Moore, Dark Nights of the Soul: A Guide to Finding Your Way Through Life's Ordeals

“Nuestra tarea no consiste en resolver la noche oscura, sino en permitir que ésta nos enriquezca.”
― Thomas Moore, Las noches oscuras del alma (Crecimiento personal)

“La depresión es una etiqueta y un síndrome, mientras que una noche oscura es un acontecimiento significativo. La depresión es una enfermedad psíquica, una noche oscura es una prueba espiritual.”
― Thomas Moore, Las noches oscuras del alma (Crecimiento personal)

“Hoy en día calificamos muchas de esas experiencias como «depresión», pero no todas las noches oscuras son depresivas, y esa palabra huele demasiado a patología para describir algo que hace que nos cuestionemos el verdadero significado de la vida.”
― Thomas Moore, Las noches oscuras del alma (Crecimiento personal)