Charles Eisenstein Quotes

33 Sourced Quotes

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
The unstoppable compulsion to act, in bigger and wiser ways than you knew possible, has already been set in motion. I'm urging you to trust in that.

Charles Eisenstein
We intuit also that something similar is possible collectively.

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

Charles Eisenstein
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
We live within a cultural mythology that tells us we are separate beings in competitive relation for power, even for survival. We long to return to a culture of inclusiveness, cooperation, and the sharing of gifts.

Charles Eisenstein
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
Constrained by habits and acculturalization, we have less choice than we imagine. Many apparently momentous decisions were actually determined within us long ago. In the long run, the most powerful choice we can make is where to focus our attention. Attention is healing. Attention is the bridge in relationship. And attention facilitates change and learning.

Charles Eisenstein
How much freer and happier we would feel, and how much more powerful we would be, if only we stopped struggling against the grain of our natural gifts and inclinations, stopped trying to be what we are not, and instead used willpower to stay true to an exciting and joyful life purpose.

Charles Eisenstein
We need way more intimacy than nearly anyone considers normal. Always hungry for it, we seek solace and sustenance in the closest available substitutes: television, shopping, pornography, conspicuous consumption - anything to ease the hurt, to feel connected, or to project an image by which we might be seen and known, or at least see and know ourselves.

Charles Eisenstein
The war against the self is the internalization of the war against nature.
We have been taught that we need an act of will to overcome our base natures. But when we try too hard to be good, we only separate ourselves from others.

Charles Eisenstein
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
The logic is backwards. Genius is the result of doing what you love, not a prerequisite for it.

Charles Eisenstein
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
No matter how complete the despair, no matter how bitter the cynicism, a possibility beckons of a world more beautiful and a life more magnificent than what we know today. Though we may rationalize it, it is not rational. We become aware of it in moments, gaps in the rush and press of modern life. These moments come to us alone in nature, or with a baby, making love, playing with children, caring for a dying person, making music for the sake of music or beauty for the sake of beauty. At such times, a simple and easy joy shows us the futility of the vast, life-consuming program of management and control.

Charles Eisenstein
Boredom is so endemic to our culture, particularly among youth, that we imagine it to be a near-universal default state of human existence. In the absence of outside stimuli we are bored. Yet…boredom is virtually unique to Western culture (and by extension to the global culture it increasingly dominates).…greed like boredom is absent in most hunter-gatherer cultures based on a more open conception of self.

Charles Eisenstein
Let me repeat that: Our civilization is constitutionally incapable of reversing the annihilation of natural capital, or even slowing it down. Get used to that. When we really understand that, the project of reconceiving civilization itself will gain powerful impetus.

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

Charles Eisenstein