Ken Wilber Quotes

“An integral approach is based on one basic idea: no human mind can be 100% wrong. Or, we might say, nobody is smart enough to be wrong all the time.”

“I have one major rule: Everybody is right. More specifically, everybody — including me — has some important pieces of truth, and all of those pieces need to be honored, cherished, and included in a more gracious, spacious, and compassionate embrace.”

“I think I was a born scientist.”

“Most of us are only willing to call 5% of our present information into question any one point.”

“Most of us, I suspect, prefer our teachers to be of the Nice Guy variety.”

“Real love will take you far beyond yourself; and therefore real love will devastate you.”

“The Enlightenment was an attempt to liberate myth and base truth claims on evidence, not just dogma. But when science threw out the church, they threw out the baby with the bath water.”

“The truth will not necessarily set you free, but truthfulness will.”

“You can only do so much damage to the biosphere with a bow and arrow. An atomic bomb is something else. The same ignorance backed by industry is capable of killing the entire world. So we have to separate those two issues—the ignorance and the means of inflicting that ignorance—because with modernity and science we have, for the first time in history, a way to overcome our ignorance, at precisely the same time that we have created the means to make this ignorance absolutely genocidal on a global scale.”

“I was slowly learning that love did not mean holding on, which I had always thought, but rather letting go.”

“Becoming a leader is the same as becoming a fully integrated human being.”

“Between life’s stimuli and our habitual responses exists choice.”

“The adventure of awakening is among the most universal of human dramas.”

“Man lives on earth not once, but three times: the first stage of his life is continual sleep; the second, sleeping and waking by turns; the third, waking forever.”

“The simple fact is that we live in a world of conflict and opposites because we live in a world of boundaries. Since every boundary line is also a battle line, here is the human predicament: the firmer one’s boundaries, the more entrenched are one’s battles. The more I hold onto pleasure, the more I necessarily fear pain. The more I pursue goodness, the more I am obsessed with evil. The more I seek success, the more I must dread failure. The harder I cling to life, the more terrifying death becomes. The more I value anything, the more obsessed I become with its loss. Most of our problems, in other words, are problems of boundaries and the opposites they create.”

“The ultimate metaphysical secret, if we dare state it so simply, is that there are no boundaries in the universe. Boundaries are illusions, products not of reality but of the way we map and edit reality. And while it is fine to map out the territory, it is fatal to confuse the two.”

“Anytime a sage displays humanness—in regard to money, food, sex, relationships—we are shocked, shocked, because we are planning to escape life altogether, not live it, and the sage who lives life offends us.”

“When most people are happy, it’s not really fun until you can share it with someone, especially someone you love, a mate or a friend.”

“The real problem is not exterior. The real problem is interior.”

“Modern science is no longer denying spirit. And that, that is epochal.”

“The cure for the disaster of modernity is to address the dissociation, not attempt to erase the differentiation!”

“When Thomas Jefferson sat on the steps of the White House and, with a pair of scissors, began to cut out all portions of the Bible that he felt were mythic nonsense, he was expressing a rational point of view.”

“This present moment, since it knows neither past nor future, is itself timeless, and that which is timeless is Eternal. Thus the eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.”

“Human beings undergo psychological development. At each level or stage of development, they will see the world in a different way.”