Hope and fear is a feeling with two sides. As long as there’s one, there’s always the other. This is the root of our pain. In the world of hope and fear, we always have to change the channel, change the temperature, change the music, because something is getting uneasy, something is getting restless, something is beginning to hurt, and we keep looking for alternatives.
In a nontheistic state of mind, abandoning hope is an affirmation, the beginning of the beginning. You could even put “Abandon hope” on your refrigerator door instead of more conventional aspirations like “Every day in every way I’m getting better and better.
Pema Chödron
from the book When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times
Read a random quote or see all quotes by Pema Chödron.
Further quotes from the book When Things Fall Apart:
- Finding out what is true
- Flooding the world with your kindness
- Negativity begets negativity
- Exposing ourselves to annihilation
- Only in our own experience
- Become Familiar with Fear
- Until we got it
- Don’t Set Out to Save the World
- Fully alive
- No fresh air
- Becoming unstuck
- Drive all blames into oneself
- What is in front of us right in the moment
- It’s just like that
- How are you
- Just being here again and again and again
- Cultivating Peace
- Disappointment
- Undoing of old ways of seeing