Rachel Naomi Remen Quotes

Most of us lead far more meaningful lives than we know. Often finding meaning is not about doing things differently, it is about seeing familiar things in new ways.

~ Rachel Naomi Remen

Perhaps wisdom is simply a matter of waiting, and healing a question of time. And anything good you've ever been given is yours forever.

~ Rachel Naomi Remen

Everybody is a story. When I was a child, people sat around kitchen tables and told their stories. We don't do that so much anymore. Sitting around the table telling stories is not just a way of passing time. It is the way the wisdom gets passed along. The stuff that helps us to live a life worth remembering.

~ Rachel Naomi Remen

Facts bring us to knowledge, but stories lead to wisdom.

~ Rachel Naomi Remen

Most of the things that give life its depth, meaning, and value are impervious to science.

~ Rachel Naomi Remen

Medicine is as close to love as it is to science, and its relationships matter even at the edge of life itself.

~ Rachel Naomi Remen

If we fear loss enough, in the end the things we possess will come to possess us.

~ Rachel Naomi Remen

In avoiding all pain and seeking comfort at all cost, we may be left without intimacy or compassion; in rejecting change and risk we often cheat ourselves of the quest; in denying our suffering we may never know our strength or our greatness.

~ Rachel Naomi Remen

Inner peace is more a question of cultivating perspective, meaning, and wisdom even as life touches you with its pain.

~ Rachel Naomi Remen

Belief traps or frees us.

~ Rachel Naomi Remen

Life wastes nothing. Over and over again every molecule that has ever been is gathered up by the hand of life to be reshaped into yet another form.p 259

~ Rachel Naomi Remen

We burn out not because we don't care but because we don't grieve. We burn out because we have allowed our hearts to become so filled with loss that we have no room left to care.

~ Rachel Naomi Remen

When we know ourselves to be connected to all others, acting compassionately is simply the natural thing to do.

~ Rachel Naomi Remen

The best stories have many meanings, their meaning changes as our capacity to understand and appreciate meaning grows.

~ Rachel Naomi Remen

Suffering shapes the life force, sometimes into anger, sometimes into blame and self-pity. Eventually it may show us the wisdom of embracing and loving life.

~ Rachel Naomi Remen

Perhaps real wisdom lies in not seeking answers at all. Any answer we find will not be true for long. An answer is a place where we can fall asleep as life moves past us to its next question. After all these years I have begun to wonder if the secret of living well is not in having all the answers but in pursuing unanswerable questions in good company.

~ Rachel Naomi Remen

Perhaps the most important thing we bring to another person is the silence in us, not the sort of silence that is filled with unspoken criticism or hard withdrawal. The sort of silence that is a place of refuge, of rest, of acceptance of someone as they are. We are all hungry for this other silence. It is hard to find. In its presence we can remember something beyond the moment, a strength on which to build a life. Silence is a place of great power and healing.

~ Rachel Naomi Remen

Of course love is never earned. It is a grace we give one another. Anything we need to earn is only approval.

~ Rachel Naomi Remen

Many times when we help we do not really serve. . . . Serving is also different from fixing. One of the pioneers of the Human Potential Movement, Abraham Maslow, said, If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.' Seeing yourself as a fixer may cause you to see brokenness everywhere, to sit in judgment of life itself. When we fix others, we may not see their hidden wholeness or trust the integrity of the life in them. Fixers trust their own expertise. When we serve, we see the unborn wholeness in others; we collaborate with it and strengthen it. Others may then be able to see their wholeness for themselves for the first time.

~ Rachel Naomi Remen

Helping, fixing, and serving represent three different ways of seeing life. When you help, you see life as weak. when you fix, you see life as broken. When you serve, you see life as whole. Fixing and helping may be the work of the ego, and service the work of the soul.

~ Rachel Naomi Remen