Quotes by Sam Keen

About Sam Keen:

Sam Keen is 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. He also co-produced Faces of the Enemy, an award-winning PBS documentary; was the subject of a Bill Moyers television special in the early 1990s; and for 20 years served as a contributing editor at Psychology Today magazine. He is also featured in the 2003 documentary Flight from Death.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

The road to creativity passes so close to the madhouse and often detours or ends there.

Sam Keen

Why would a person prefer the accusations of guilt, unworthiness, ineptitude - even dishonor and betrayal- to real possibility? This may not seem to be the choice, but it is: complete self effacement, surrender to the "others", disavowal of any perso...

Sam Keen

The root of humanly caused evil is not man's animal nature, not territorial aggression, or innate selfishness, but our need to gain self-esteem, deny our mortality, and achieve a heroic self-image. Our desire for the best is the cause of the worst.

Sam Keen

Man cannot endure his own littleness unless he can translate it into meaningfulness on the largest possible level.

Sam Keen

Obviously, all religions fall far short of their own ideals.

Sam Keen

the best existential analysis of the human condition leads directly into the problems of God and faith

Sam Keen

Better guilt than the terrible burden of freedom and responsibility.

Sam Keen

Relationship is thus always slavery of a kind, which leaves a residue of guilt.

Sam Keen

Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever.

Sam Keen

[Man] literally drives himself into a blind obliviousness with social games, psychological tricks, personal preoccupations so far removed from the reality of his situation that they are forms of madness, but madness all the same.

Sam Keen

He has no doubts, there is nothing you can say to sway him, to give him hope or trust. He is a miserable animal whose body decays, who will die, who will pass into dust and oblivion, disappear forever not only in this world but in all the possible di...

Sam Keen

Too much possibility is the attempt by the person to overvalue the powers of the symbolic self. It reflects the attempt to exaggerate one half of the human dualism at the expense of the other. In this sense, what we call schizophrenia is an attempt b...

Sam Keen

We are gods with anuses.

Sam Keen

...Erich Fromm wondered why most people did not become insane in the face of the existential contradiction between a symbolic self, that seems to give man infinite worth in a timeless scheme of things, and a body that is worth about 98¢.

Sam Keen

Neurotic identity crises come when our defense mechanisms have been too successful and we're encapsulated in the fortress we have constructed with nothing to refresh us in our solitary confinement. So we play the old movies with their stale fears and...

Sam Keen

We come to love not by finding a perfect person, but by learning to see an imperfect person perfectly.

Sam Keen

There are two questions a man must ask himself: The first is 'Where am I going?' and the second is 'Who will go with me?' If you ever get these questions in the wrong order you are in trouble.

Sam Keen

Burnout is nature's way of telling you, you've been going through the motions your soul has departed; you're a zombie, a member of the walking dead, a sleepwalker. False optimism is like administrating stimulants to an exhausted nervous system.

Sam Keen

Deep summer is when laziness finds respectability.

Sam Keen

The sacred is discovered in what moves and touches us, in what makes us tremble.

Sam Keen

Author Bio

  • NameSam Keen
  • Descriptionauthor, professor, and philosopher
  • ProfessionPhilosopher