Al Lerner Quotes

We'll always be disappointed if we believe that we can plan for a peak experience and make it happen. True joy can't be anticipated or planned. It just strikes.

It's a cliché, but also a deep truth (as cliché's tend to be), that you can't love another person very well if you don't love yourself.

Youth has many glories, but judgement is not one of them, and no amount of electronic amplification can turn a belch into an aria.

Although the connections are not always obvious, personal change is inseparable from social and political change.

A city grows like an organism. It is a structure of living and working together a mix of functions.

Cities are not problems. They are solutions.

Bureaucracy is like a fungus that contaminates everything.

The real sadness of fifty is not that you change so much but that you change so little.

The bolder and more courageous you are, the more you will learn about yourself.

When you can't see yourself objectively, you won't see anyone else objectively, either.

The car is the cigarette of the future.

After working in cities for nearly 40 years, I am telling you that every city can improve its quality of life in less than three years, no matter the scale or the financial conditions.

I’ll work my way from irony to sincerity in the sinking city, a would-be Whitman of the vulnerable grid.

I'm defending fiction as a human capacity more than as a popular or dying literary genre.

Art has to offer something other than stylized despair.

Principles-and I have in mind such principles as states' rights or national sovereignty or the free market or pacifism-have a way of drying up while the sap of life goes flowing in another direction.

Stay close to the young... and a little rubs off.

Despite the success cult, men are most deeply moved not by the reaching of the goal but by the grandness of the effort involved in getting there - or failing to get there.

Why can't a woman be more like a man? Men are so honest, so thoroughly square; Eternally noble, historically fair; Who, when you win, will always give your back a pat. Why can't a woman be like that?

You see what happens today. Women act like men and want to be treated like women.

nursing was regarded as simply an extension of the unpaid services performed by the housewife - a characteristic attitude that haunts the profession to this day.

The politics of surprise leads through the Gates of Astonishment into the Kingdom of Hope.

Don't count on the power of your love or your nagging to create something that wasn't there to begin with.

Intimate relationships cannot substitute for a life plan. But to have any meaning or viability at all, a life plan must include intimate relationships.

Pretending can be a bold form of experimentation and inventiveness. In pretending joy or happiness, we may discover or enhance our capacity for it.

Back home everyone said I didn't have any talent. They might be saying the same thing over here, but it sounds better in French.

Sometimes the most helpful thing you can do is to stop trying to be helpful.

Creativity starts when you cut a zero from your budget.

Of the many things we have done to democracy in the past, the worst has been the indignity of taking it for granted.

We can’t have landfills forever and we can’t ask others to accept our trash.

I always try to say, 'If you want to help the environment, try to do just two things. One, use less of your car. Second, separate your garbage.'

The problem of freedom in America is that of maintaining a competition of ideas, and you do not achieve that by silencing one brand of idea.

There's a smile on my face for the whole human race.

The first world we find ourselves in is a family that is not of our choosing.

Wherever you find a wife and mother-in-law slugging it out, you'll find a son who's not speaking up to either his mother or his wife.

Pleasure without joy is as hollow as passion without tenderness.

I always run into these Ph.D.s. They write and write and write about sustainable development. Then these guys ask me, 'But, how do you do it?' They are scared to death to do anything.

There is no endeavor more noble than the attempt to achieve a collective dream.

At Cisco, I made every decision based on what was good for the company, and that pretty much ruined my marriage and my health.

I seek peace, let me BE peace.

Shaving is a way to start the workday by ritually not cutting your throat when you've the chance.

There is no crime in the cynical American calendar more humiliating than to be a sucker.

We cannot live by power, and a culture that seeks to live by it becomes brutal and sterile. But we can die without it.

I could have spread my wings and done a thousand things I've never done before.

The transpersonal is more awe-inspiring, more exciting than the thing we confuse it for.

In our rich consumers' civilization we spin cocoons around ourselves and get possessed by our possessions.

When evil acts in the world it always manages to find instruments who believe that what they do is not evil but honorable.

In the end, as any successful teacher will tell you, you can only teach the things that you are. If we practice racism then it is racism we teach.

Many of our problems with anger occur when we choose between having a relationship and having a self.

We must face what we fear; that is the case of the core of the restoration of health.