55 Quotes by Steve Hagen

When we latch on to an identity, it is easy to take offense. But we offend ourselves. We lock ourselves into very rigid ways of seeing and thinking and feeling and reacting. It doesn’t have to be this way. The fact is, I’m not anything in particular. Nor are you. Nor is anyone.

It’s called enlightenment. It’s nothing more or less than seeing things as they are rather than as we wish or believe them to be.

We’ve formed many a theory and belief, but as we look about the human world, it is clear that nobody actually knows what’s going on. Yet claims to Truth are being made at every hand, including the claim that there is no Truth.

We have to realize what we are. The range of what is human is vast, ranging from the saintly to the monstrous. When we speak of other human beings as if they somehow do not belong to our species, we ignore the reality of our very nature.

You want to not have any problems.

Good and bad aren’t absolutes. They are beliefs, judgements, ideas based on limited knowledge as well as on the inclinations of our minds.

This will never come again.

Socrates pointed out that we carry on as though death were the greatest of all calamities – yet, for all we know, it might be the greatest of all blessings.

We determine what is good, what is bad, what ought to be, and what ought not to be- all out of our inclinations of mind. But we seldom recognize the total relativity- the total meaninglessness – of all our defining. We don’t see that it’s through our obsession with meaning that we create meaninglessness.