20 Thomas Moore Quotes from Original Self on Life, Fulfillment, and Identity

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Excerpt: Learn how to strip away everything that is covering, distracting, and blocking what Thomas Moore might consider to be… your Original Self.

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Introduction:

Below, you will find our list of Thomas Moore quotes from Original Self that offer fresh interpretations for living your life with passion, understanding, and originality. His insights are rich and timely and will stir your soul awake as you confront and reflect on some of the highlighted thoughts that we gathered together for you today.

Learn about why it may be more important to be “awake” than “successful” or “balanced.” Read about the soul and why so many people might feel “alien” to theirs and how that also might be triggering issues in relationships. Find out what Moore considers to be “the way out of the dehumanizing effects of modern capitalism and industrialism”—something that certainly couldn’t be more timely in today’s world. And much more.

Said beautifully on the book itself, “with his usual grace and insight, Moore counters the prevailing assumptions of the day and offers strikingly unorthodox views on what is virtuous and healthy, opening up possibilities for a renewal of the way we live socially and in our private lives.” It’s a holistic approach to living a better life—by learning how to strip away everything that is covering, distracting, and blocking what Moore might consider to be, your Original Self. Enjoy!

The List: 20 Rich and Stirring Thomas Moore Quotes from Original Self on Life, Fulfillment, and Identity

“Care of the soul often means getting out of the way rather than doing something.”

Thomas Moore, Original Self

“Memory is potent.  It does something to us.  It makes us who we are.  It gives us depth.  It ties our past to our present to overcome the disjunction of a too literal life.  It focuses our attention on the imagination of events rather than on events taken literally.  Memory is a kind of poetry.”

Thomas Moore, Original Self

“Anxiety is nothing but fear inspired by an imagined future collapse.  It is the failure of trust.”

Thomas Moore, Original Self

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“It may be more important to be awake than to be successful, balanced, or healthy. What does it mean to be awake? Perhaps to be living with a lively imagination, responding honestly and courageously to opportunity and avoiding the temptation to follow mere habit or collective values. It means to be an individual, in every instance manifesting the originality of who we are. This is the ultimate form of creativity—following the lead of the deep soul as we make a life.”

Thomas Moore, Original Self

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“Today many people live the external life exclusively, and when the inner world erupts or stirs, they rush to a therapist or druggist for help.  They try to explain profound mythic developments in the language of behavior and experience.  Often they have no idea what is happening to them, because they have been so cut off from the deep self.  Their own soul is so alien to them that they are unaware of what is going on outside the known realm of fact.  Former methods of keeping in touch with the inner life have gone out of mode.  Diaries, letters, and deep conversations help focus attention on developments and materials that lie beneath the surface.  Only one hundred years ago, without benefit of typewriters and word processors, people kept elaborate, long and detailed diaries and notebooks.  We seem to have left behind these methods of reflection in favor of technologies for action.”

Thomas Moore, Original Self

“When we are living only a portion of what a human being is capable of, our lives are incomplete.  I don’t mean that we each have to do everything possible in life, but that the more possibilities we can imagine, the richer our lives will be.  Defending ourselves against the stranger is a way of keeping out our own potentiality.  The diminishment of our acquaintances is a diminishment of ourselves.  The most challenging stranger is life itself, or the soul, the face and source of vitality.  Life is always presenting new possibilities, and we may fear that bountifulness.  It may seem safer to be content with what we have and what we are, and so we cling to the status quo.  But in these matters there is no convenient plateau.  When we refuse a new offering of life, we develop emotional calluses.  The habit of acting from fear sets in quickly and becomes steadily more rigid.  Refusing life, we become attendants of death.”

Thomas Moore, Original Self

“Long life is indeed a blessing, but maybe we overdo our concern for the length of our lives and give insufficient attention to the passion we bring to whatever time we have.  The meaning and purpose of life are great mysteries, and in that light a very brief life, of only minutes, can be full and rounded.  The soul has appeared in the flesh; then it returns to its home of origin.”

Thomas Moore, Original Self

“Almost every day we are asked to extend the range of our acquaintance with life.  It is one of several ways to live intensely, and it is also a way to prepare for death.  For death is the ultimate stranger.  This is not necessarily a morbid thought, because only by allowing death to play a role in daily life do we really live.  Opening to another society or another individual – they are two levels of culture – we die a little death in relation to what has become familiar.  But those little deaths create openings to new life.”

Thomas Moore, Original Self

“However bright or dim we are, we will still make mistakes.  If I kept a diary of all the bad decisions I have made in my life, it would be too thick to carry.  But as in most things, it may take a bundle of mistakes to arrive at something sublime, just as it takes thousands of flowers to produce a few drops of perfume.”

Thomas Moore, Original Self

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“The way out of the dehumanizing effects of modern capitalism and industrialism is not to change the system but to read good books.”

Thomas Moore, Original Self

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“In my own experience, it is often the brief, simple, original books that turn out to be the most useful.  The books I have on my special shelf – books for personal, lifelong use – are all brief and untraditionally structured.  They are almost all illustrated, and they have considerable blank space on a page.  These are not sources of information but books for meditation.  A book is virtual space that invites contemplation and perusal.  In this space one tarries and looks around, absorbing the atmosphere, and then leaves, the author hopes, happy to have visited.”

Thomas Moore, Original Self

“We are a population that is satisfied with sound-bite news, instant and opinionated political analysis, manipulative popular psychology, and insubstantial novels and magazines.  At the same time, and understandably, we feel the absence of meaning and are speechless when we learn of atrocities in our society.  We don’t know how to think about them because we don’t know how to think, and we don’t know how to think because we don’t believe that thinking for its own sake is worthy of our attention.  We educate our children to make a good living rather than to become thinking persons, and often we honor as celebrities those who have not made a genuine contribution to society but who mirror our own madness.”

Thomas Moore, Original Self

“We are what we read.  We are the educators of our own personalities.  Certainly we have great influence in the crafting of our children.  If we brought half the intelligence to the making of souls that we bring to the making of machines, we would be people of character and imagination.  We would be sharp and therefore less inclined to kill and cheat each other.  We would know where to find the deep pleasures, so we would be less desperate for shallow entertainments and the ephemeral gratifications of gadgets.”

Thomas Moore, Original Self

“Living closer to nature helps simplify because nature itself, though complex, keeps us in tune with basic rhythms and pleasures that never change and that provide grounding.  When our family moved next to a farm, we found simplicity in the food we ate and in new sources for our entertainment and pleasure.  Learning how to ride a horse is a complicated process, but riding is a simple pleasure that offers lasting satisfaction.”

Thomas Moore, Original Self

“Simplifying the externals allows us to cultivate a rich inner and outer life.  A cluttered existence may keep us busy, but busyness doesn’t mean that we are fully engaged in what we are going.  Usually, just the opposite, we feel busy because we are neurotically active at things that don’t matter much in the long run.  It does little good to be successful in a business that requires sixty hours of work a week, while the simple pleasures of home life are neglected.  A complicated person can simplify life and in that simplicity find a sharp articulation of values.  Complicated lives often do the opposite: they show to what extent the person is lost in the busyness of the world.”

Thomas Moore, Original Self

“Living in the moment can become a moralistic principle, a burden rather than a way to intensify life.  The difference might depend on who takes the lead in the dance and who chooses the music.  The soul is a community of many interior persons, many of them capable leaders.  The ego is only one among them and probably should not always run the show.  A good dancer or musician allows the music to take over, becomes absorbed in the complex harmonies and tempos, and is the servant of the materials at hand.  The secret of a soul-based life is to allow someone or something other than the usual self to be in charge.”

Thomas Moore, Original Self

“The way to find a soul mate is to be a person with soul.”

Thomas Moore, Original Self

“We may come to know our friends and lovers over years of conversation and experience, but we may eventually realize that it is enough to love them without knowing what they are all about.  We may not approve of everything they do, and we may not appreciate their eccentric ways, but still we know and appreciate them.  We have faith that in the dimness of our ignorance we have the opportunity to give ourselves more fully to their reality.  Unconditional love means that we don’t love on the condition that we understand.”

Thomas Moore, Original Self

“Many people are desperate to find a soul mate, someone who responds to their deep image of love and intimacy.  They go to great lengths to meet people, and they spend considerable time feeling achingly deprived of the joys of intimacy they imagine.  Their attitude is summed up in the frequent lament: When am I going to find the person who is right for me?  This approach to love seems to reflect the narcissism of the times.  When am I going to get what I need for my growth and my satisfaction? An alternative would be to give all that attention either to one’s own life – developing one’s talents, educating oneself in culture, and simply becoming an interesting person – or to a needy society.  This crafting of a life is a positive way of preparing oneself for intimacy.”

Thomas Moore, Original Self

“The capacity for solitude is a prerequisite for intimacy with another.  Otherwise, it may well be that the desperate search for a partner is merely the expression of personal emptiness, and if that is the case, any relationship will be founded on weak grounds and will not satisfy the yearning for connection.  The expression ‘soul mate’ can mean a partnership in which the soul is engaged, in which one’s own soul connects with another’s.  This is no small thing, and it reaches far deeper than the resolution of any superficial search for romance.  Part of what we long for in our wish for a soul mate is intimacy with and the expression of our own soul.”

Thomas Moore, Original Self

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If you enjoyed these quotes from Original Self, then you’ll definitely enjoy reading Thomas Moore’s book in full. It comes highly recommended:

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