We hope you enjoy our little encyclopaedia of quotations :-)
A
Acceptance
By allowing the 'is-ness' of all things, a deeper dimension reveals itself to you, an abiding presence, an unchanging deep stillness, a joy without cause beyond good or evil. This is the joy of being, the peace of God.
Eckhart Tolle
Anger
In those moments when I am angry and feel the need for respect, the truth is that I long for empathetic understanding of the fear and pain within me.
Kelly Bryson
B
Beauty of Needs
Seeing the beauty in a person is most needed when he communicates in a way that makes just that most difficult.
Marshall B. Rosenberg
Be as you are
Show yourself as you are or be as you show yourself.
Rumi
Being alive
Whatever the feeling - whether pain or joy - it is a gift and its beauty lies in the fact that it shows you that you are alive. The goal in life is not to always be happy, but to laugh all our laughter and cry all our tears. Whatever is revealed in us, it is life that is revealed in it.
Marshall B. Rosenberg
Being taken seriously
In a dispute, both sides have an equal desire to be taken seriously.
Marshall B. Rosenberg
Beliefs
From the passions grow opinions; the inertia of the mind congeals these into convictions.
Friedrich Nietzsche
C
Change
When we are truly heard with our feelings and needs, we change.
Marshall B. Rosenberg
Charity:
Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. Everything else will fall to you.
Consciousness
[...] open your eyes and go to a tree, and look at it, and come to consciousness.
Jacob Boehme
Consciousness, by its nature, exists only in the singular. I would like to say: the total number of all "consciousnesses" is always merely "one".
Erwin Schrödinger
Creative power
The better we are in relationship with each other, the better we can create together.
Kelly Bryson
D
Depression
Depression is the reward for being good.
Marshall B. Rosenberg
Doing
If you want to know who you were, look at who you are. If you want to know who you will be, look at what you are doing.
Buddha
E
Empathy
What I want in my life is empathy, a flow between me and others based on mutual giving from the heart.
Marshall B. Rosenberg
Encounter
All real life is encounter.
Martin Buber
Energy
Energy is indeed the stuff of which all elementary particles, all atoms, and therefore all things in general are made, and at the same time energy is also the moving thing.
Werner Heisenberg
Energy
Basically, matter does not exist. At least not in the usual sense. There is only a structure of relationships, constant change, liveliness. We find it difficult to imagine this. Primarily, there is only connection, that which unites without a material basis. We could also call it spirit. Something we only experience spontaneously and cannot grasp. Matter and energy only appear secondarily - to a certain extent as coagulated, solidified spirit. According to Albert Einstein, matter is only a diluted form of energy. Its subsoil, however, is not an even more refined energy, but something quite different, precisely liveliness. We can compare it, for example, with the software in a computer.
Hans-Peter Dürr
F
Freedom
Belief in a bigger and better future is one of the most powerful enemies of present freedom.
Aldous Huxley
Fear
Fear, in whatever form, prevents us from understanding ourselves and our relationships with all things.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
Fulfilment
When we express our needs, the chance increases that our requests will be fulfilled.
Marshall B. Rosenberg
G
God
I tried to find him at the cross of the Christians, but he was not there. I went to the temples of the Hindus and to the ancient pagodas, but I could find no trace of him anywhere. I looked for him in the mountains and valleys, but neither in the heights nor in the depths could I find him. I went to the Kaaba in Mecca, but he was not there either. I consulted the scholars and philosophers, but he was beyond their understanding. I examined my heart, and there he dwelt when I saw him. He is nowhere else to be found.
Rumi
God dwells in a light / To which the path breaks / He who does not become it himself / Eternally does not see him.
Angelus Silesius
Goodness
Kindness in thought produces depth, kindness in giving produces love, kindness in words produces truth.
Lao Tse
Good things
All good things have something casual about them and lie like cows in the meadow.
Friedrich Nietzsche
H
Happiness
Do you want to be right or happy? You can't have both.
Marshall B. Rosenberg
Heart
What the heart resists, the head will not admit.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Heaven and Hell
Instead of liberating his own heart, [he] tries to liberate the world. ...
All gods, all heavens, all hells are in you.
Joseph Campbell
I
I am. But I do not have me. That is why we first become.
Ernst Bloch
I - in the broadest sense of the word, i.e. every consciously thinking spiritual being that calls itself or has felt itself an "I" - is the person, insofar as there is one at all, who directs the "movement of the atoms" in accordance with the laws of nature.
Erwin Schrödinger
Impression
The wrong impression works in the one who has it.
Bert Hellinger
Individual
The individual who is not anchored in God is unable to resist the physical and moral power of the world on the basis of his personal opinion. For this, man needs the evidence of his inner, transcendent experience....
Carl Gustav Jung
J
Judgements
Judgements (even about myself) are a tragic expression of unfulfilled needs.
Marshall B. Rosenberg
Joke
The joke is an epigram on the death of a feeling.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Joy
What inspires me most about CSF is the gleam in people's eyes when they transform their emotional pain into joy, freedom and compassion.
Robert Gonzales
K
Knowledge
The first condition of all knowledge is that it is one and the same, that there is knowing, and that there is being known.
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling
L
Love
So this is that special love which also recognises the other in his love. It does not oppress him with its own love, but also recognises his love and takes from him what he gives. How does one learn love? By taking love.
Bert Hellinger
Love
Through years of observation I have found that human beings are subject to certain orders and I call them the orders of love. Today I would call them the laws of life, which no human being can escape and which unfold their effects whether we know them or not.
Bert Hellinger
M
Meaning
The meaning of human existence lies in the knowledge of the divine source of all being.
Aldous Huxley
Mindfulness
The whole idea of compassion is based on a passionate mindfulness of the interdependence of all living beings.
Thomas Morton
Membrane
It was in this state that I experienced "myself" as melded and intertwined with hundreds of billions of other beings in a thin sheet of consciousness that was distributed around the galaxy. A "membrane".
John C. Lilly
Man
The human being becomes the "I" through the "you".
Martin Buber
Myth
Myth is much more important and true than history. History is just journalism and you know how unreliable it is.
Joseph Campbell
N
Narcissism
A baby's feelings and desires know no bounds as they are part of everything it sees, touches and perceives. So babies are obviously narcissistic, but not in the same way as adults ... and I am a little afraid that Freud sometimes forgets that the narcissistic baby has no self-awareness.
Jean Piaget
Needs
If we don't take our needs seriously, others won't either.
Marshall B. Rosenberg
Non-violent resistance
does not mean doing nothing. It means making the tremendous effort that is necessary to defeat evil with good.
This effort is not built on strong muscles and diabolical weapons: it is built on moral courage, on self-control, and on the unforgettable, tenacious consciousness that there is no man on earth - however brutal, however personally hostile - without an innate foundation of goodness, without a love of justice, without a respect for what is true and good; all this is attainable by anyone who uses the appropriate means.
Aldous Huxley
O
Ocean
The ocean that I am has poured itself into its own waves. Strange, boundless ocean that I am
Rumi
Observer
Observing without judging is the highest form of human intelligence.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
P
Perception
If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?
George Berkeley
Perfection
Every human perfection is related to a mistake, into which it threatens to pass; but also vice versa, every mistake, to a perfection.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Power
You can decide at any time how you take in the words of your counterpart, the power is with you.
Marshall B. Rosenberg
Prejudice
Every word is a prejudice.
Friedrich Nietzsche
R
Reality
The soul is chained to its body and fused with it, forced to see reality through the body as through bars, rather than through its own unobstructed vision.
Plato
Reality
Now, however, the quantum postulate means that every observation of atomic phenomena demands a non-negligible interaction with the means of measurement, and that therefore neither the phenomena nor the means of observation can be ascribed an independent physical reality in the ordinary sense.
Niels Bohr
Relationships
Remember that the world out there reflects your reality. The people in front of whom your reaction is strongest, be it love or hate, are projections of your inner world. What you hate most is what you deny most about yourself. What you love most is what you want most in yourself. Use the mirror of relationships to guide your development. The goal is a comprehensive knowledge of yourself. When you get that, what you want most will automatically be there; what you dislike most will disappear.
Deepak Chopra
Reviews
It is never the facts that worry and annoy us, it is always our own evaluations.
Marshall B. Rosenberg
Right and wrong
Beyond right and wrong lies a place where we meet.
Rumi
S
Science
The first sip from the glass of science makes you an atheist, but God is waiting for you at the bottom of the glass.
Werner Heisenberg
Science
My personal view is that in a future science reality will be neither "mental" nor "physical", but somehow both and somehow neither.
Wolfgang Pauli
Self
The reason that our feeling perceiving and thinking self appears nowhere in our scientific world view,
can easily be expressed in five words: It is itself this world-view. It is identical with the whole and therefore cannot be be contained in it as a part.
Erwin Schrödinger
Self-knowledge
He who knows others is wise. He who knows himself is enlightened.
Lao Tse
Spirit
As a physicist who has devoted his whole life to sober science, to the study of matter, I am certainly free from the suspicion of being taken for a swarm spirit. And so, after my explorations of the atom, I say this: There is no matter in itself. All matter arises and exists only through a force which sets the atomic particles in vibration and holds them together to form the tiniest solar system in the universe. But as there is neither an intelligent force nor an eternal force in the whole universe - mankind has not succeeded in inventing the much longed-for perpetual motion machine - we must assume a conscious intelligent spirit behind this force. This spirit is the original cause of all matter.
Max Planck
T
Taking and giving
Where one wants to take, one must give.
Lao Tse
Thoughts
Thoughts are the shadows of our sensations - always darker, emptier, simpler than these.
Friedrich Nietzsche
To make touchable
What if you were to openly show all your otherness, weakness and insecurity without questioning your self-respect?
Marshall B. Rosenberg
Tourism
Every human being needs a spiritual practice. I recommend that you turn to native worship. Everything else is tourism.
Aldous Huxley
Treasure
The cave you fear to enter contains the treasure you seek.
Joseph Campbell
Trouble
is a wonderful clue, it is an alarm clock. As soon as I get angry, I know that I have not heard the other person properly. The cause of my anger is my thoughts: instead of connecting with what is going on in the other person, I am up in my head judging that he has done something wrong. Violence comes from the belief that other people cause our pain and deserve punishment for it.
Marshall B. Rosenberg
Truth
In the realm of the mind, what one believes to be true is true or becomes true - within the limits determined by experience and experiment. These limits, in turn, are beliefs to be transcended.
John C. Lilly
Truth is the invention of a liar.
Heinz von Förster
U
Unhappiness
The main cause of unhappiness is never the situation, but your thoughts about it.
Eckhart Tolle
Unhappiness
Enlightenment, in the most comprehensive sense of progressive thinking, has always pursued the goal of removing fear from people and making them masters. But the fully enlightened earth shines with the sign of triumphant disaster. The programme of the Enlightenment was the disenchantment of the world. It wanted to dissolve myths and overthrow imagination with knowledge ... but myth itself is enlightenment, and: Enlightenment recoils in mythology.
Max Horckheimer / Theodor Adorno
Universe
You are the universe. It expresses itself for a time as a human being.
Eckhart Tolle
Universe
There are no truly solipsistic philosophers and those who think they are are deceiving themselves. The true solipsist feels at one with the universe and is so identical with it that he does not even feel the need for two concepts.
Jean Piaget
W
Way
If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.
Max Planck
Way
When you see your path clearly laid out before you, it may be someone else's path.
Joseph Campbell
World
The world is my imagination.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Words
Words can be windows or walls.
Marshall B. Rosenberg