Marilyn Ferguson Quotes

39 Sourced Quotes

Mystical experiences nearly always lead one to a belief that some aspect of consciousness is imperishable. In a Buddhist metaphor the consciousness of the individual is like a flame that burns through the night. It is not the same flame over time, yet neither is it another flame.

Marilyn Ferguson
Only that which is deeply felt can change us. Rational arguments alone cannot penetrate the layers of fear and conditioning that comprise our crippling belief system.

Marilyn Ferguson
Although most of us are complacent in our assumption that science is gaining on the unknown, scientists are acknowledging that man's own brain is complex beyond any hope of complete understanding.

Marilyn Ferguson
Fear is a question: What are you afraid of, and why? Just as the seed of health is in illness, because illness contains information, our fears are a treasurehouse of self-knowledge if we explore them.

Marilyn Ferguson
An atmosphere of trust, love, and humor can nourish extraordinary human capacity. One key is authenticity: parents acting as people, not as roles.

Marilyn Ferguson
Of all the self-fulfilling prophecies in our culture, the assumption that aging means decline and poor health is probably the deadliest.

Marilyn Ferguson
When one begins the transformative process, death and birth are imminent: the death of custom as authority, the birth of the self.

Marilyn Ferguson
Real progress in understanding nature is rarely incremental. All important advances are sudden intuitions, new principles, new ways of seeing. We have not fully recognized this process of leaping ahead, however, in part because textbooks tend to tame revolutions...They describe the advances as if they had been logical in their day, not all shocking.

Marilyn Ferguson
Transformation is a journey without a final destination.

Marilyn Ferguson
No one can persuade another to change. Each of us guards a gate of change that can only be opened from the inside. We cannot open the gate of another, either by argument or emotional appeal.

Marilyn Ferguson
So long as we need to control other people, however benign our motives, we are captive to that need. In giving them freedom, we free ourselves.

Marilyn Ferguson
The brain's calculations do not require our conscious effort, only our attention and our openness to let the information through. Although the brain absorbs universes of information, little is admitted into normal consciousness.

Marilyn Ferguson
The spiritual quest begins, for most people, as a search for meaning.

Marilyn Ferguson
After a dark, violent age, the Piscean, we are entering a millennium of love and light — in the words of the popular song 'the Age of Aquarius' — the time of 'the mind's true liberation.

Marilyn Ferguson
Sometimes in astronomy, a heavenly body has been virtually invisible until a single observer detects its presence and points it out to his colleagues, who then see it with increasing clarity. Perhaps a myriad of unknown senses are only awaiting our consciousness.

Marilyn Ferguson
The person and society are yoked, like mind and body. Arguing which is more important is like debating whether oxygen or hydrogen is the more essential property of water.

Marilyn Ferguson
Fear is a question What are you afraid of, and why? Just as the seed of health is in illness, because illness contains information, your fears are a treasure house of self-knowledge if you explore them.

Marilyn Ferguson
The difference between transformation by accident and transformation by a system is like the difference between lightning and a lamp. Both give illumination, but one is dangerous and unreliable, while the other is relatively safe, directed, available.

Marilyn Ferguson
War is unthinkable in a society of autonomous people who have discovered the connectedness of all humanity, who are unafraid of alien ideas and alien cultures, who know that all revolutions begin within and that you cannot impose your brand of enlightenment on anyone else.

Marilyn Ferguson
A fully functioning employee with a healthy self-image is money in the bank.

Marilyn Ferguson
Whatever the cost in personal relationships, we discover that our highest responsibility, finally, unavoidably is the stewardship of our potential—being all that we can be.

Marilyn Ferguson
A belated discovery, one that causes considerable anguish, is that no one can persuade another to change [italics in original]. Each of us guards a gate of change that can only be unlocked from the inside. We cannot open the gate of another, either by argument or emotional appeal.

Marilyn Ferguson
Cynics know the answers without having penetrated deeply enough to know the questions. When challenged by mysterious truths, they marshal 'facts'.

Marilyn Ferguson
Over the years your bodies become walking autobiographies, telling friends and strangers alike of the minor and major stresses of your lives.

Marilyn Ferguson
Cultural transformation announces itself in sputtering fits and starts, sparked here and there by minor incidents, warmed by new ideas that may smoulder for decades. In many different places, at different times, the kindling is laid for the real conflagration — the one that will consume the old landmarks and alter the landscape forever.

Marilyn Ferguson
Power is a central issue in social and personal transformation. Our sources and uses of power set our boundaries, give form to our relationships, even determine how much we let ourselves liberate and express aspects of the self. More than party registration, more than our purported philosophy or ideology, personal power defines our politics.

Marilyn Ferguson
If we are to find our way across troubled waters, we are better served by the company of those who have built bridges, who have moved beyond despair and inertia.

Marilyn Ferguson
By definition, revolutions are not linear, one step at a time, event A leading to event B, and so on. Many causes operate on each other at once. Revolutions shift into place suddenly, like the pattern in a kaleidoscope. They do not so much proceed as crystallize.

Marilyn Ferguson
Many artists have said that when life itself becomes fully conscious, art as we know it will vanish. Art is only a stopgap, an imperfect effort to wrest meaning from an environment where nearly everyone is sleepwalking.

Marilyn Ferguson
Risk always brings its own rewards: the exhilaration of breaking through, of getting to the other side; the relief of a conflict healed; the clarity when a paradox dissolves. Whoever teaches us this is the agent of our liberation. Eventually we know deeply that the other side of every fear is freedom.

Marilyn Ferguson