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Sam Keen Quotes
1931–2025 United States
Sam Keen (June 25, 1931 – March 23, 2025) was an American author, professor and philosopher who is best known for his exploration of questions regarding love, life, religion, and being a man in contemporary society.
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34 quotes
Where authority represses freedom, rebellion becomes the hard work of love, which is necessary because love, freedom, and spirit are inseparable.
A prime time to catch yourself putting on your personality is in the moments between sleeping and waking.
The female has learned by long experience to win by losing, to wield power in the passive-aggressive manner of the sadomasochist.
Within the horizon of this [western] myth, love is understood as the artificial restraining of our natural impulses toward unbridled aggression.
The neurosis of normality is a case of repetition compulsion caused by the repression of awareness.
Meditation, like masturbation, has until recently been considered a form of self-abuse.
Secular culture, with the aid of psychoanalysis, has continued the old Christian habit of observing the self only to criticize it.
It is the vocation of each person to become unique.
The outlaw is the conscious warrior who makes use of the aggression to break down the walls, barriers, and boundaries that artificially separate and alienate.
Hero tales suggest the price of courage is beyond the ordinary budget. They tempt us to disown the common capacity of the human spirit to transcend normality.
If you live out of a negative identity, … others will always be cast in the mold of the enemy against whom you must struggle.
A society that trains us to specialize in making, doing, performing, and producing neglects to educate us in wonder and appreciation.
For the adult, all the world is a stage and the personality is the mask one wears to play the assigned role. The outlaw quietly takes a seat in the back row of the theater of the mind and watches.
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.
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.
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.
Overstimulation of the adrenal glands (with consequent exhaustion of the spirit) is the price of our incorporation within the male womb of the modern corporate society.
Myth is the system of basic metaphors, images, and stories that in-forms the perceptions, memories, and aspirations of a people; provides the rationale for its institutions, rituals and power structure; and gives a map of the purpose and stages of life.
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.
One of the commonest perversions of love is to limit it to the private sphere.
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