Quotes

The real battle in the world today is not among civilizations or cultures but among the different evolutionary futures that are possible for us and our species right now.

What is at stake is nothing less than the choice of who we are, who we want to be, and where we want to take the world we live in.

The real question then is "What are we here for?"

-- Otto Scharmer

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, probably for the first time in human history, the living presence of the abyss - that is, the simultaneous existence of one world that is dying and another one that is being born - is a widely shared experience for millions of people across cultures, sectors, and generations. It is experienced in communities as well as in ministries, global companies, NGOs, and UN organizations - wherever people are looking at the real picture.

It's a felt sense that applies to relationships, institutions, and systems, but even more to the personal level of our journey from self to Self.

-- Otto Scharmer

This is the moment when what we need most is enough people with the skill, heart, and wisdom to help us pull ourselves back from the edge of breakdown and onto a different path.

-- Otto Scharmer

I don't believe the purpose of life is to just be happy.

Why would God take fourteen billion years to produce highly evolved sentient life-forms that would ultimately develop the extraordinary capacity for self-reflective awareness, simply in order for them to be able to experience happiness?

It's my conviction that we are here for a reason, that there is a grand and great purpose to our presence in this universe, and that none of us are going to truly find what we are looking for unless we get over our misguided pursuit of personal happiness and connect with that greater sense of purpose—that ultimate reason for being.

-- Andrew Cohen

The idea that this universe in all its million-fold order and precision is the result of blind chance is as credible as the idea that if a print shop blew up all, the type would fall down again in the finished and faultless form of the dictionary.

-- Albert Einstein

The foundation of spiritual life is clarity of intention.

Do I want to become a liberated vessel for the evolutionary impulse in this world?

We each have to decide: what is most important to me? Once the intention is clear, the mind becomes focused. When the mind is focused there is one-pointedness. When there is one-pointedness, the evolutionary impulse will guide us.

Through remaining true to our own highest intention, again and again and again, we will discover soul strength, spiritual strength—the inspired courage to take responsibility for ourselves, for our culture, and, ultimately, for the destiny of the evolutionary process itself.

-- Andrew Cohen

If we do not believe within ourselves this deeply rooted feeling that there is something higher than ourselves, we shall never find the strength to evolve into something higher.

-- Rudolf Steiner

If a man makes his life desolate by losing touch with the unseen, he not only destroys in his inner self something, the decay of which may eventually drive him to despair, but through his weakness he constitutes a hindrance to the evolution of the whole world in which he lives.

-- Rudolf Steiner

The business that leaders are in today, is the business of transforming awareness... There is deep longing for more meaning, for connections.

-- Otto Scharmer

God does not die on the day when we cease to believe in a personal deity, but we die on the day when our lives cease to be illumined by the steady radiance, renewed darfcily, of a wonder, the source of which is beyond all reason.

-- Dag Hammarskjöld

I don't know Who — or what — put the question, I don't know when it was put. I don't even remember answering. But at some moment I did answer 'Yes' to Someone — or Something — and from that hour I was certain that existence is meaningful and that, therefore, my life, in self-surrender, had a goal.

-- Dag Hammarskjöld

The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed.

-- Albert Einstein

I am fully convinced that the soul is indestructible, and that its activity will continue through eternity.
It is like the sun, which, to our eyes, seems to set in night; but it has in reality only gone to diffuse its light elsewhere.

-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe