Charles Eisenstein famous quotes

Trust your intuition and be guided by love.
-- Charles Eisenstein

#Intuition #Trust Your Intuition

Addiction, self-sabotage, procrastination, laziness, rage, chronic fatigue, and depression are all ways that we withhold our full participation in the program of life we are offered. When the conscious mind cannot find a reason to say no, the unconscious says no in its own way.
-- Charles Eisenstein

#Procrastination #Self #Addiction

More than a mere alternative strategy, regenerative agriculture represents a fundamental shift in our culture’s relationship to nature.
-- Charles Eisenstein

#Agriculture #Alternatives #Fundamentals

The force of love, the force of reunion is unstoppable.
-- Charles Eisenstein

#Reunion #Unstoppable #Force

No one's ever completely broken. It's just a matter of how much has to fall apart before the ember of life is exposed to air.
-- Charles Eisenstein

#Grief #Fall #Loss

I think most kids have a sense that it's not supposed to be this way. You're not supposed to hate Monday, or be happy when you don't have to go to school. School should be something that you love. Life should be something that you love.
-- Charles Eisenstein

#Monday #Hate #Love Life

The cynic thinks that he is being practical and that the hopeful person is not. It is actually the other way around. Cynicism is paralyzing, while the naïve person tries what the cynic says is impossible and sometimes succeeds.
-- Charles Eisenstein

#Thinking #Hopeful #Trying

One of the ways that your project, your personal healing, or your social invention can change the world is through story. But even if no one ever learns of it, even if it is invisible to every human on Earth, it will have no less of an effect.
-- Charles Eisenstein

#Healing #Stories #World

When any of us meet someone who rejects dominant norms and values, we feel a little less crazy for doing the same. Any act of rebellion or non-participation, even on a very small scale, is therefore a political act.
-- Charles Eisenstein

#Crazy #Political #Littles

The gift economy represents a shift from consumption to contribution, transaction to trust, scarcity to abundance and isolation to community.
-- Charles Eisenstein

#Community #Scarcity #Isolation

Is it too much to ask, to live in a world where our human gifts go toward the benefit of all? Where our daily activities contribute to the healing of the biosphere and the well-being of other people?
-- Charles Eisenstein

#Healing #People #Benefits

We have to create miracles. A miracle is not the intersession of an external divine agency in violation of the laws of physics. A miracle is simply something that is impossible from an old story but possible from within a new one. It is an expansion of what is possible.
-- Charles Eisenstein

#Law #Agency #Miracle

Contemporaneous with the financial crisis we have an ecological crisis and a health crisis. They are intimately interlinked. We cannot convert much more of the earth into money, or much more of our health into money, before the basis of life itself is threatened.
-- Charles Eisenstein

#Earth #Financial #Ecological Crisis

In a gift economy, the more you give, the richer you are.
-- Charles Eisenstein

#Giving #Economy

We are all here to contribute our gifts toward something greater than ourselves, and will never be content unless we are.
-- Charles Eisenstein

Ultimately, work on self is inseperable from work in the world. Each mirrors the other; each is a vehicle for the other. When we change ourselves, our values and actions change as well. When we do work in the world, internal issues arise that we must face or be rendered ineffective.
-- Charles Eisenstein

#Mirrors #Self #Issues

Even the most thorough change happens once choice at a time
-- Charles Eisenstein

#Choices #Thorough

The present convergence of crises––in money, energy, education, health, water, soil, climate, politics, the environment, and more––is a birth crisis, expelling us from the old world into a new.
-- Charles Eisenstein

#Water #Energy #Climate

We sense that ‘normal’ isn’t coming back, that we are being born into a new normal: a new kind of society, a new relationship to the earth, a new experience of being human.
-- Charles Eisenstein

#New Relationship #Earth #Normal

When we must pay the true price for the depletion of nature’s gifts, materials will become more precious to us, and economic logic will reinforce, and not contradict, our heart’s desire to treat the world with reverence and, when we receive nature’s gifts, to use them well.
-- Charles Eisenstein

#Heart #Desire #Pay

When everything is subject to money, then the scarcity of money makes everything scarce, including the basis of human life and happiness. Such is the life of the slave—one whose actions are compelled by threat to survival. Perhaps the deepest indication of our slavery is the monetization of time.
-- Charles Eisenstein

#Survival #Scarcity #Slavery

True discipline is really just self-remembering; no forcing or fighting is necessary.
-- Charles Eisenstein

#Fighting #Self #Discipline

How beautiful can life be? We hardly dare imagine it.
-- Charles Eisenstein

#Beautiful #Life Is #Imagine

We have to believe in a more beautiful world in order to serve it.
-- Charles Eisenstein

#Beautiful #Believe #Order

There is a vast territory between what we're trying to leave behind, and where we want to go - and we don't have any maps for that territory.
-- Charles Eisenstein

#Trying #Maps #Want

Enlightenment is a group activity.
-- Charles Eisenstein

#Enlightenment #Groups

Each person you interact with, is an entire universe unto themselves, a Divine Being, unspeakabley precious.
-- Charles Eisenstein

#Attitude #Divine #Persons

A miracle is an invitation into a new story.
-- Charles Eisenstein

#Miracle #Stories #Invitations

The primary method by which governments increase their control is by creating fear.
-- Charles Eisenstein

#Government #Creating #Increase

For a machine to run smoothly and predictably, its parts must be standard and hence replaceable, features which contribute, respectively, to modern depersonalization and anxiety.
-- Charles Eisenstein

#Running #Anxiety #Machines

The regime of control tightens inexorably in our schools, many of which now have video cameras, police patrols, chain-link fences, random unannounced locker searches, metal detectors, drug-sniffing dogs, networks of informants, undercover police posing as students, and a comprehensive system of passes so that there is a record of each student's authorized whereabouts at all times. What a perfect preparation for life in a prison or a totalitarian society!
-- Charles Eisenstein

#Dog #School #Perfect

The financial crisis we are facing today arises from the fact that there is almost no more social, cultural, natural, and spiritual capital left to convert into money.
-- Charles Eisenstein

#Spiritual #Today #Facts

The world is on fire! Why am I sitting in front of my computer? It is because I don’t have a fire extinguisher for the world, and there isn’t a global 911 to call.
-- Charles Eisenstein

#Fire #Sitting #World

Real change doesn't come without crisis. Childbirth doesn't come without crisis. I think that's happening with humanity now. Our growth has generated multiple crises...and these are the contractions that are propelling us into a new world, whether we like it or not, but I think we're going to like it.
-- Charles Eisenstein

#Love #Real #Thinking

The holistic acupuncturist and the sea turtle rescuer may not be able to explain the feeling, 'We are serving the same thing,' but they are. Both are in service to an emerging story of the People that is the defining mythology of a new kind of civilization.
-- Charles Eisenstein

#Turtles #Sea #Civilization

You can't have community as an add-on to a monetized life. You have to actually need each other.
-- Charles Eisenstein

#Community #Add #Needs

It is the cry of the separate self, ‘What about me?’ As long as we keep acting from that place, it doesn’t matter who wins the war against (what they see as) evil. The world will not deviate from its death-spiral.
-- Charles Eisenstein

#War #Winning #Self

Each experience of love nudges us toward the Story of Interbeing, because it only fits into that story and defies the logic of Separation.
-- Charles Eisenstein

#Stories #Nudge #Logic

What you're looking for, you won't find. But only by looking for it can it find you.
-- Charles Eisenstein

Are the problems of the world caused by bad people who need to be crushed? Or do people do bad things when they are in a certain situation? If it is the latter, then we can go around crushing the villains for another thousand years and nothing will change.
-- Charles Eisenstein

#Crush #Years #People

Love is the felt experience of connection to another being. An economist says 'more for you is less for me.' But the lover knows that more of you is more for me too. If you love somebody their happiness is your happiness. Their pain is your pain. Your sense of self expands to include other beings. This shift of consciousness is universal in everybody, 99% and 1%.
-- Charles Eisenstein

#Pain #Love Is #Self

Joint consumption doesn’t create intimacy,
-- Charles Eisenstein

#Joints #Intimacy #Consumption

An economist says that essentially more for you is less for me, but the lover knows that more for you is more for me, too.
-- Charles Eisenstein

#Love #Lovers #Economist

When both sides of a controversy revel in the defeat and humiliation of the other side, in fact they are on the same side: the side of war.
-- Charles Eisenstein

#War #Facts #Sides

Property is, after all, a social convention, an agreement about someone's exclusive right to use a thing in specified ways. However, we seem to have forgotten this. We seem to think that property belongs to us in some essential way, that it is of us. We seem to think that our property is part of ourselves, and that by owning it we therefore make ourselves more, larger, greater.
-- Charles Eisenstein

#Thinking #Agreement #Essentials

It is quite normal to fear what one most desires. We desire to transcend the Story of the World that has come to enslave us, that indeed is killing the planet. We fear what the end of that story will bring: the demise of much that is familiar.Fear it or not, it is happening already.
-- Charles Eisenstein

#Desire #Stories #Demise

When do you manipulate others for your own advantage? When I notice myself doing it, usually it is when I am feeling insecure.
-- Charles Eisenstein

#Insecure #Feelings #Advantage

The state of interbeing is a vulnerable state. It is the vulnerability of the naive altruist, of the trusting lover, of the unguarded sharer. To enter it, one must leave behind the seeming shelter of a control-based life, protected by walls of cynicism, judgment, and blame.
-- Charles Eisenstein

#Wall #Shelter #Lovers

How do we change the world? Change the story.
-- Charles Eisenstein

#Stories #World #Changing The World

We are not just a skin-encapsulated ego, a soul encased in flesh. We are each other and we are the world.
-- Charles Eisenstein

#Ego #Soul #Skins