Marianne Williamson Best Quotes

Usually, when we think of power, we think of external power. And we think of powerful people as those who have made it in the world. A powerful woman isn’t necessarily someone who has money, but we think of her as someone with a boldness or a spark that makes her manifest in a dramatic way. When we think of a powerful man, we think of his ability to manifest abundance, usually money, in the world. Most people say that a powerful woman does best with a powerful man, that she needs someone who understands the bigness of her situation, a man who can meet her at the same or even greater level of power in the world. Now this is true, if power is defined as material abundance. A woman often faces cultural prejudice when she makes more money than a man, as does he. A woman who defines power by worldly standards can rarely feel totally relaxed in the arms of a man who doesn’t have it. If power is seen as an internal matter, then the situation changes drastically. Internal power has less to do with money and worldly position, and more to do than with emotional expansiveness, spirituality and conscious living… I used to think I needed a powerful man, someone who could protect me from the harshness and evils of the world. What I have come to realize is that…the powerful man I was looking for would be foremost, someone who supported me in keeping myself on track spiritually, and in so maintaining clarity within myself, that life would present fewer problems. When it did get rough, he would help me forgive. I no longer wanted somebody who would say to me, “Don’t worry honey, if they’re mean to you I’ll beat them up or buy them out.” Instead, I want someone who prays and meditates with me regularly so that fewer monsters from the outer world disturb me, and who when they do, helps me look within my own consciousness for answers, instead of looking to false power to combat false power. There’s a big difference between a gentle man and a weak man. Weak men make us nervous. Gentle men make us calm.

Forgiveness is “selective remembering”—a conscious decision to focus on love and let the rest go. But the ego is relentless—it is “capable of suspiciousness at best and viciousness at worst.

Love is everywhere, but if our eyes aren’t open to see it, we miss out. Who among us hasn’t missed out on love because we were looking for it in one package and it came in another? Our problem is rarely a lack of love so much as a mental block to our awareness of its presence.*

There’s a myth that some people are more faithful than others. A truer statement is that in some areas, some of us are more surrendered than others. We surrender to God first, of course, the things we don’t really care that much about anyway. Some of us don’t mind giving up our attachment to career goals, but there’s no way we’re going to surrender our romantic relationships, or vice versa. Everything we don’t care that much about—fine—God can have it. But if it’s really, really important, we think we better handle it ourselves. The truth is, of course, that the more important it is to us, the more important it is to surrender. That which is surrendered is taken care of best. To place something in the hands of God is to give it over, mentally, to the protection and care of the beneficence of the universe. To keep it ourselves means to constantly grab and clutch and manipulate. We keep opening the oven to see if the bread is baking, which only ensures that it never gets a chance to.

The process of miraculous change is twofold.  One:  I see my error or dysfunctional pattern.  Two: I ask God to take it from me.  The first principle without the second is impotent.  As they say in Alcoholics Anonymous, your best thinking got you here.  You're the problem but you're not the answer. The second principle isn't enough to change us either. The Holy Spirit can't take from us what we will not release to him.  He won't work without our consent.  He cannot remove our character defects without our willingness, because that would be violating our free will.  We chose those patterns, however mistakenly, and he will not force us to give them up.  In asking God to heal us, we're committing to the choice to be healed.

It’s like avoidance behavior in therapy—wanting to share the gossip but not wanting to deal with the real, more painful issues. Of course we want to avoid the pain. But by doing so, we inevitably cause more of it.

We are not held back by the love we didn’t receive in the past, but by the love we’re not extending in the present. Marianne Williamson

By striving to be the best we can be, we create the internal blueprint by which we do the best we can do. On a soul level, we want to work, we want to create, we want to be productive and serve others and share our gifts with the world.

It helps to ask ourselves why we choose to play so small when we don’t have to. Belief is powerful, and whatever we believe, we will subconsciously make manifest. So why do we hold on to core beliefs about ourselves that are so demeaning? When we ask that question, the answers emerge: “My family told me it wasn’t okay to think I was a big deal.” “I thought people wouldn’t like me if I ‘had it all.’” “I thought it might hurt my father’s feelings if I made more money than he did.” Yet whatever pain we might experience at others’ negative reactions to our spreading our wings, is nothing compared to the pain we cause ourselves by clipping them. At this time on the planet, no one can feel good about withholding their magnificence. Expressing your full potential is not just your right; it’s your responsibility. As long as you keep thinking in limited terms, disbelieving in the possibility of infinite possibility in your life, then you will never experience the miracles God has in store for you. You will deny His gifts, taking on the ego’s servitude instead. In a world such as this, fear is often the path of least resistance. If you want a miracle, you have to consciously claim it. And for everyone out there who might say, “How dare you?” there are at least two more who will say, “Thank you for showing me how.

I’ve noticed in myself that if something small and ultimately meaningless has gone wrong—I can’t find the file I left on top of my desk, my daughter failed to do what I asked her to do before going to a friend’s house—I can easily get rattled. But if someone calls to inform me of a serious difficulty—someone has been in an accident, or a child is in trouble—I notice a profound stillness come over me as I focus on the problem. In the former case, my temptation to become frantic does not attract solutions, but rather hinders them. There is nothing in my personal energy that invites help from others, nor do I have the clarity to think through what I need to do next.

Excitement doesn't knock at your door any less when you're older than when you're younger. It's just that when you're younger, you're more likely to open the door and let it in. With age, you start growing ambivalent about excitement. You might say that you want it, but at the same time you're not sure you have the energy for it. Yet a surefire way to diminish your energy is to deny the Ultimate energy pill, which is participation in life itself.

May God’s will be done” is the same thing as saying, “May I become the best that I’m capable of being.

We can’t change other people’s thinking, but in fact we don’t need to because all minds are joined.* All we have to do is change our own thinking, and as we do, the world will change with us.

I can see that the spiritual path has been the calling of my soul for a very long time, and I am ready to devote the rest of my life to walking it as best I can.

Practice kindness, and you start to become kind. Practice discipline, and you start to become disciplined. Practice forgiveness, and you start to become forgiving. Practice charity, and you start to become charitable. Practice gentleness, and you start to become gentle.

How different my life will be if I let go, allowing the universe to do its dance without my constant interference. Today I release the thought that I know what is best—for myself, for the world, or for anyone in it. I relax into the patterns of a divinely orchestrated universe, asking only to be guided where I can best fit in and be used in service to love’s will.

You are loved, and your purpose is to love.” — Marianne Williamson In grief we realize that this is the catch-22 of life. Love is the most joyous and meaningful experience there is. Love gives our lives purpose. But love’s conjoined twin is grief. If we love, we will eventually grieve. So what is there to do but continue loving? When we express our ongoing love for the person who died, we are mourning and moving toward healing. When we embrace the love of others, we are accepting the balm of grace and healing. If we shun or hide ourselves from love, on the other hand, we are choosing to die while we are alive. Love, then, is not just the best answer—it is the only answer.

How can I best serve the world?” take precedence over “What can I get out of this?” Within that realm, we naturally do get a job, we naturally do create money, and we naturally do produce an outer prosperity that reflects the prosperity in our hearts.

To change our lives for the better, the first thing we have to do is stop projecting our ego-based sub-selves all over the place. Leading with Me the depressed, Me the insecure, Me the angry, and Me the frightened is not exactly the psychological equivalent of putting your best foot forward.

In remembering the truth of where we came from, we become more open to the truth of who we are.

There are only two core emotions: love and fear. And love is to fear as light is to darkness: in the presence of one, the other disappears. As we shift our perceptions from fear to love—sometimes in cases where it’s not so hard and ultimately in cases where it takes spiritual mastery to do so—we become miracle workers in the truest sense. For when our minds are surrendered to love, they are surrendered to a higher power. And from that, all miracles follow.

To achieve a miraculous experience of life, we must embrace a more spiritual perspective. Otherwise, we will die one day without ever having known the real joy of living. That joy emerges from the experience of our true being—when we detach from other people’s projections onto us, when we allow ourselves permission to dream our greatest dreams, when we’re willing to forgive ourselves and others, when we’re willing to remember that we were born with one purpose: to love and be loved.

Everything that happens is part of a mysterious educational process in which we’re subconsciously drawn to the people and situations that constitute our next assignment. With every lesson we’re challenged to go deeper, become wiser and more loving. And whatever our next step is, the lesson awaits us wherever we are.

From Fear to Love We spend so much time on unimportant things—things with no ultimate meaning—yet for reasons no one seems to fully understand, such nonessentials stand at the center of our worldly existence. They have no connection to our souls whatsoever, yet they have attached themselves to our material functioning. Like spiritual parasites, they eat away our life force and deny us our joy. The only way to rid ourselves of their pernicious effects is to walk away… not from things that need to get done, but from thoughts that need to die.

The world we see reflects the people we’ve become, and if we do not like what we see in the world, we must face what we don’t like within ourselves.

Crossing the bridge to a better world begins with crossing a bridge inside our minds, from the addictive mental patterns of fear and separation, to enlightened perceptions of unity and love. We’re in the habit of thinking fearfully, and it takes spiritual discipline to turn that around in a world where love is more suspect than fear.

The most important thing to remember during times of great change is to fix our eyes anew on the things that don’t change.

The fact that we go about our lives as though the survival of the world is not at stake is not the sign of a stiff upper lip. It is the sign, rather, of a society not yet able or willing to hold a conversation about its deepest pain.

Who we ourselves become, how we grow and change and face the challenges of our own lives, is intimately and causally connected to how the world will change over the next few years.

And so, I think, there is a collective depression among us, not so much dealt with as glossed over and suppressed. Each of us, as individual actors in a larger drama, carries an imprint of a larger despair. We are coping with intense amounts of chaos and fear, both personally and together. We are all being challenged, in one form or another, to recreate our lives.

When things aren’t going well for you in your personal life, perhaps you call a friend or family member or go to a therapist or support group to process your pain. Yet when your feelings of upset are based on larger social realities, it’s hard to know how to talk about them and to whom.

Every situation comes bearing a gift: a chance to become who we really want to be and to live the lives we really want to live.

In a world that seems split in two between fear and love, our greatest power lies in sharpening our own focus. Some things in the world today are very, very dark; what the world needs now is more people who are working for the light.

When I am at the effect of the problem, I become part of the problem. When I am centered within myself, I become part of the solution. And that phenomenon, multiplied many times over, is the force that will save the world.

When things in the world are troubling, our need is not to join in the chaos, but to cleave to the peace within.

By learning the lessons of change, internally and externally, each of us can participate in the great collective process in which the people of the world, riding a wave of enlightened understanding, see the human race on a destructive course and turn it around in time. To some this might feel like the period of a Great End, perhaps even at times an Armageddon, but in fact this is the time of a Great Beginning. It is time to die to who we used to be and to become instead who we are capable of being. That is the gift that awaits us now: the chance to become who we really are. And that is the miracle: the gift of change.

Do terrorists hate us just some of the time? Do they have a casual commitment to their cause? Do they take less than seriously the goal of full manifestation of their worldview? The only way we will triumph over hate is to become as deeply committed to love as some people are committed to hate, as deeply devoted to expressing our love as some people are devoted to expressing their hate, and as firm in our conviction that love is our mission as some are that hate is theirs.

Practice kindness, and you start to become kind. Practice discipline, and you start to become disciplined. Practice forgiveness, and you start to become forgiving. Practice charity, and you start to become charitable. Practice gentleness, and you start to become gentle.

When we spend more time working to view life through loving eyes, and less time trying to figure out why we’re unhappy to begin with, then our lives transform much faster.

Our capacity to change our minds is the greatest gift that God has given us, and it is also the most powerful.* He is present within us, in any moment, to help us return our minds to love.

The happiest times of my life have been when I was more involved in something I was doing for others than in something I was doing for myself.

It is not those who judge and condemn us, but rather those who bless and forgive us, who awaken us from our lower nature and return us to our better selves.

I know that for me, someone constantly telling me I’m not okay is hardly what helps me improve.

For whatever reason people may need to project their own anger and guilt on you, you don’t have to accept it if it’s not yours.

A supportive smile, an e-mail, the smallest gesture can make the difference in helping another person believe in himself or herself. From a material perspective, what we give away we lose. But from a spiritual perspective, only what we give away do we get to keep.* When we’re more generous with our support for others, the universe itself shows more support for us.

Love extended is the key to happiness; love withheld is the key to pain.

We are here because we have a mission: to be the love that is missing in a loveless world and thus reclaim this darkened world for light.

You get bitter or better.” I want to be like her in that sense; I want the negative to fall away, like a ball that has been thrown to me but that I don’t have to hold onto. Even when we are victimized, we usually made some mistakes we need to take a good look at.

On the level of true solution, love is the answer no matter what category of human experience. According to Mahatma Gandhi, love can heal all social and political as well as personal relationships.

The more things are happening on the outside, the more important it is to find that stillness on the inside.

And every change is a challenge to remember what’s true. Love is the only absolute reality, which never changes and never dies. Dwelling in that which does not change, while things around us are changing all the time, is our key to inner peace.

That’s why, as Gandhi said, we must be the change we want to see happen in the world.