Marilyn Ferguson quotes

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)
Over the years your bodies become walking autobiographies, telling friends and strangers alike of the minor and major stresses of your lives. View quote
Marilyn Ferguson
Your past is not your potential. In any hour you can choose to liberate the future. View quote
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. View quote
Marilyn Ferguson
We have two strategies for coping; the way of avoidance or the way of attention. View quote
Marilyn Ferguson
The spiritual quest begins, for most people, as a search for meaning. View quote
Marilyn Ferguson
Not realizing that our species evolved in cooperation, we have opted for competition in work, school, relationships. Not understanding the body's ability to reorganize its internal processes, we have drugged and doctored ourselves into bizarre side effects. View quote
Marilyn Ferguson
And it is the body's hysterical overreaction to a virus, rather than the virus itself, that makes us ill. View quote
Marilyn Ferguson
The capacity for denial is an example of the body's sometimes short-sighted vision. Some of the body's automatic responses hurt over the long run more than they help. The formation of scar tissue, for example, prevents the nerves in the spine from reconnecting after an accident. In many injuries, swelling causes more damage than the original trauma. View quote
Marilyn Ferguson
The perturbation would come from the privileged classes, he said, because that is the way of revolutions. They are launched by those disenchanted with the culture's ultimate reward system. View quote
Marilyn Ferguson
Spiritual or mystical experience, the subject of this chapter, is the mirror image of science-a direct perception of nature's unity, the inside of the mysteries that science tries valiantly to know from the outside. This way of understanding predates science by thousands of years. Long before humankind had tools like quantum logic to describe events that ordinary reason could not grasp, individuals moved into the realm of paradox through a shift in consciousness. And there they know that what cannot be is. (Marilyn Ferguson)
If our memories are as absorbent as research has demonstrated, our awareness as wide, our brains and bodies as sensitive; if we can will changes in our physiology at the level of a single cell; if we are heirs to such evolutionary virtuosity-how can we be performing and learning at such mediocre levels? If we're so rich, why aren't we smart? View quote
Marilyn Ferguson
The Aquarian Conspiracy is also working to ease hunger-for meaning, connection, completion. And each of us is "the whole project," the nucleus of a critical mass, a steward of the world's transformation. View quote
Marilyn Ferguson
The discovery of freedom, for instance, means little if we are not empowered to act, to be free for something, not just from something. As fear falls away, we are less afraid of power's Siamese twin, responsibility. View quote
Marilyn Ferguson
There are no passengers on Spaceship Earth. Everybody's crew. View quote
Marilyn Ferguson
Of all the self-fulfilling prophecies in our culture, the assumption that aging means decline and poor health is probably the deadliest. View quote
Marilyn Ferguson
The greatest revolution in our generation is that of human beings, who by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives. View quote
Marilyn Ferguson
Ultimately we know deeply that the other side of every fear is freedom. View quote
Marilyn Ferguson
Whether or not it was written in the stars, a different age seems to be upon us; and Aquarius, the waterbearer in the ancient zodiac, symbolizing flow and the quenching of an ancient thirst, is an appropriate symbol. View quote
Marilyn Ferguson
The spirit of our age is fraught with paradox. It is at the same time pragmatic and transcendental. It values both enlightenment and mystery... power and humility ... interdependence and individuality. It is simultaneously political and apolitical. Its movers and shakers include individuals who are impeccably Establishment allied with one-time sign-carrying radicals. View quote
Marilyn Ferguson
Sooner or later, if human society is to evolve-indeed, if it is to survive-we must match our lives to our new knowledge. For too long, the Two Cultures-the esthetic, feeling humanities and cool, analytical science-have functioned independently, like the right and left hemispheres of a split-brain patient. We have been the victims of our collective divided consciousness. (Marilyn Ferguson)
Not understanding our societies as great organisms, we have manipulated them into "cures" worse than the ailments. View quote
Marilyn Ferguson
Because we have not understood that wholes are more than the sum of their parts, we have assembled our information into islands, an archipelago of disconnected data. Our great institutions have evolved in virtual isolation from one another. View quote
Marilyn Ferguson
Because we have not understood the brain's ability to transform pain and disequilibrium, we have dampened it with tranquilizers or distracted it with whatever was at hand. View quote
Marilyn Ferguson
Half a century ago in Holism and Evolution Jan Smuts tried to synthesize Darwin's evolutionary theory, Einstein's physics, and his own insights to account for the evolution of mind as well as matter. Wholeness, Smuts said, is a fundamental characteristic of the universe-the product of nature's drive to synthesize. View quote
Marilyn Ferguson