Sam Keen: Trending quotes

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“The evil we previously objectified and assigned to exterior agents—devils, communists, capitalists, chauvinists, faithless lovers, the system—must be discovered within. We can no longer divide the world between good and evil. The line between saints and sinners runs down the middle of my being... I destroy my propaganda machine that automatically casts me in a favorable light and others in the shadow.”

Sam Keen

Source: The Passionate Life (1983), pp. 146-147

“It has been fashionable in the twentieth century not only to debunk myth, … but to pretend that that reasonable and educated people could avoid the embarrassment of religion and the risk of metaphysics by sticking close to demonstrable facts and testable hypotheses. However, in the course of reducing our beliefs and hopes to certainties and proofs, we impoverished and deluded ourselves. The modern anti-myth reduced human life to a story without a point, a tale told by an idiot, a process without a purpose, a journey without a goal, an affair without a climax (Godot never comes), an accidental collision of mindless atoms. … We have hardly noticed that economics, technology and politics have become the new myth and metaphysic. We haven’t avoided myth and metaphysics, only created demeaning ones.”

Sam Keen

Source: The Passionate Life (1983), p. 22

“A society that trains us to specialize in making, doing, performing, and producing neglects to educate us in wonder and appreciation.”

Sam Keen

Source: The Passionate Life (1983), p. 102

“Beneath the smiling mask, we can see the injury that results from a deficiency of rebellion. The nice ones are never quite real. They lack self-definition, self-confidence, because they have never created boundaries and limits for themselves by making decisions. Having never dared to break the taboos they suffer from shame. Their sins are ones of omission rather than commission. They “have left undone those things they ought to have done,” most especially deciding for themselves what is good and evil.”

Sam Keen

Source: The Passionate Life (1983), pp. 82-83

“Outlaw consciousness is born the moment I drop out, stop the world, cease being an actor identified with the mythic roles I have been playing in society. Change begins when I do nothing except observe. The wisdom of the railroad crossing: Stop. Look. Listen. Meditation is the healthy form of voyeurism.”

Sam Keen

Source: The Passionate Life (1983), p. 135

“Secular culture, with the aid of psychoanalysis, has continued the old Christian habit of observing the self only to criticize it.”

Sam Keen

Source: The Passionate Life (1983), p. 162

“The neurosis of normality is a case of repetition compulsion caused by the repression of awareness.”

Sam Keen

Source: The Passionate Life (1983), p. 140

“Within the horizon of this [western] myth, love is understood as the artificial restraining of our natural impulses toward unbridled aggression.”

Sam Keen

Source: The Passionate Life (1983), p. 24

“The decision to become an individual, to allow oneself to be moved by the deepest impulses of the self rather than the social consensus, can only be made with fear and trembling.”

Sam Keen

Source: The Passionate Life (1983), p. 129

“If you live out of a negative identity, … others will always be cast in the mold of the enemy against whom you must struggle.”

Sam Keen

Source: The Passionate Life (1983), p. 79

“In the presence of our addictions, we are not free to ask what we really desire. Eros is silent. The addiction floods us with the noise of its demands, the plans for its satisfaction. There is no interval for deliberation.”

Sam Keen

Source: The Passionate Life (1983), p. 139

“The difference between narcissism and self-love is a matter of depth. Narcissus falls in love not with the self, but with an image or reflection of the self—with the persona, the mask. The narcissist sees himself through the eyes of another, changes his lifestyle to conform with what is admired by others, tailors his behavior and expression of feelings to what will please others. Narcissism is … voluntary blindness, an agreement … not to look beneath the surface.”

Sam Keen

Source: The Passionate Life (1983), p. 163

“There is a crucial difference between the criminal and the outlaw. The criminal is a perverse rebel who acts out against the law. … The outlaw is a supranormal individual who cares about others too much to accept the limitations on eros that are imposed by normal life. Thus the outlaw question moves outside end beyond, not against the law. While the rebel is an antinomian, merely rejecting the established, the outlaw is motivated by a quest for autonomy.”

Sam Keen

Source: The Passionate Life (1983), p. 130-131

“In a political situation where tyranny reigns and rebellion is not tolerated, few men and women will have the luxury of going beyond the stance of the rebel.”

Sam Keen

Source: The Passionate Life (1983), p. 77

“To love the carnal self means to love the body-mind. I cannot abuse my body with alcohol, stress, and self-indulgence and still claim to love my self.”

Sam Keen

Source: The Passionate Life (1983), p. 165

“The gentlest and most insidious way we are dominated by the body politic is by the official versions of the good life that are implicit in advertising and propaganda. Happiness is a new car, a color TV—fill in the gap with your own “freely chosen” artificially stimulated desire.”

Sam Keen

Source: The Passionate Life (1983), p. 102