1. “The only way to learn compassion is through your heart; you have to back up and pass through your own pain.” – Matthew Fox
2. “A lot of the time I hate acting. It has a lot to do with the way I was brought up in a world where showing your emotions is frowned upon. It’s just not manly. I don’t do anything in life because I love doing it. It’s because I want to be good at it.” – Matthew Fox
3. “A lot of people want to see this idealized version of heroism, all pretty and perfect, and I’m not interested in playing the goody-goody hero at all.” – Matthew Fox
4. “We honor life when we work. The type of work is not important: the fact of work is. All work feeds the soul if it is honest and done to the best of our abilities and if it brings joy to others.” – Matthew Fox
5. “A global awakening can only happen from a spiritual awakening that is of global dimensions.” – Matthew Fox
6. “I directed an episode of ‘Party of Five’ toward the very end of that show. It was a great experience.” – Matthew Fox
7. “I didn’t learn to swim until I was 21 or something because I grew up in the mountains in Wyoming and all the water is glacier runoff and cold.” – Matthew Fox
8. “Having a studio tell you when to jump and how high eight months of the year for six years is not a relationship I want to get into again.” – Matthew Fox
9. “Creation is all space, all time – all things past, present, and future.” – Matthew Fox
10th of 45 Matthew Fox Quotes
10. “Do not confuse beauty with beautiful. Beautiful is a human judgment. Beauty is All. The difference is everything.” – Matthew Fox
11. “Beauty saves. Beauty heals. Beauty motivates. Beauty unites. Beauty returns us to our origins, and here lies the ultimate act of saving, of healing, of overcoming dualism.” – Matthew Fox
12. “Sustainability is another word for justice, for what is just is sustainable and what is unjust is not.” – Matthew Fox
13. “Evil is the shadow of angel. Just as there are angels of light, support, guidance, healing, and defense, so we have experiences of shadow angels. And we have names for them: racism, sexism, homophobia are all demons – but they’re not out there.” – Matthew Fox
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14. “To recover a spiritual tradition in which creation, and the study of creation, matters would be to inaugurate new possibilities between spirituality and science that would shape the paradigms for culture, its institution, and its people.” – Matthew Fox
15. “Soul is our appetite, driving us to eat from the banquet of life. People filled with the hunger of soul take food from every dish before them, whether it be sweet or bitter.” – Matthew Fox
16. “Our self-expression is meant to be a manifestation of the silence of our hearts.” – Matthew Fox
17. “What is of most moment of compassion is not feelings of pity but feelings of togetherness.” – Matthew Fox
18. “When our inner self connects to our work and our work to our inner self, the work knows no limit, for the inner self knows no limit.” – Matthew Fox
19. “Creation is all things and us. It is us in relationship with all things. All things, the ones we see and the ones we do not; the whirling galaxies and the wild suns, the black holes and the microorganisms, the trees and the stars, the fish and the whales – the molten lava and the towering snow-capped mountains, the children we give birth to and their children, and theirs, and theirs, and theirs.” – Matthew Fox
20th of 45 Matthew Fox Quotes
20. “The whole purpose of letting pain be pain is this: to let go of pain. By entering into it, we see that we are strong enough and capable enough to move through it. We find out that it ultimately has a gift for us.” – Matthew Fox
21. “If you look closely at a tree you’ll notice its knots and dead branches, just like our bodies. What we learn is that beauty and imperfection go together wonderfully.” – Matthew Fox
22. “I played football for a huge portion of my life, all the way through college actually.” – Matthew Fox
23. “Compassion is not pity … compassion never considers an object as weak or inferior. Compassion, one might say, works from a strength born of awareness of shared weakness, and not from someone else’s weakness. And from the awareness of the mutuality of us all. Thus to put down another as in pity is to put down oneself.” – Matthew Fox
24. “The universe is in the habit of making beauty. There are flowers and songs, snowflakes and smiles, acts of great courage, laughter between friends, a job well done, the smell of fresh-baked bread. Beauty is everywhere.” – Matthew Fox
25. “Today’s Catholic church seems to reward authoritarian personalities who are clearly ill, violent, sexually obsessed and unable to remember the past.” – Matthew Fox
26. “I think that there’s a hidden darkness in all of us!” – Matthew Fox
27. “Healthy mysticism praises acts of letting go, of being emptied, of getting in touch with the space inside and expanding this until it merges with the space outside. Space meeting space; empty pouring into empty. Births happen from that encounter with emptiness, nothingness. . . . Let us not fight emptiness and nothingness, but allow it to penetrate us even as we penetrate it.” – Matthew Fox
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28. “A civilization built on dualism and war within and between persons, one that puts its most creative minds and its best engineers to sadistic work building more and more destructive weapons, is no civilization at all. It needs a radical transformation from the heart outwards. It needs to outgrow and outlaw war just as in the last century it outlawed slavery. The human race has outgrown war, but it hardly knows it yet.” – Matthew Fox
29. “I consider Otto Rank to be one of the great spiritual giants of the twentieth century, a genius as a psychologist and a saint as a human being. Though vilified by his original community of Freudians, he never became bitter. He died a feminist and deeply committed to social justice, in 1939…His deep understanding of creativity makes him a mentor for all of us living in a postmodern world…I believe that Art and Artist, especially chapters 12 to 14, may well emerge as the most valuable psychoanalysis of the spiritual life in our time.” – Matthew Fox
30th of 45 Matthew Fox Quotes30. “The system is not working. That is how a paradigm shift begins: the established way of seeing the world no longer functions.” – Matthew Fox
31. “Faith takes us to deep places, to the ruptures in our self-confidence and our lives. Do not settle for spiritual comfort all the time…Darkness is divine also. Faith is not about positive thinking so much as about what kicks in when we are weak, sick, and short of self-confidence. The via Positiva never stands alone. The via negativa is always with us on our faith journey as well.” – Matthew Fox
32. “I’m not saying I want a film career because I think I’m too good for television. I’m simply saying I want more control over my life.” – Matthew Fox
33. “I enjoy a four-seasonal climate and wide-open spaces, so being on an island 2,500 miles into the South Pacific made me feel a little claustrophobic.” – Matthew Fox
34. “What is common to all paths that are spiritual is, of course, the Spirit-breath, life energy, that is why all true paths are essentially one path because there is only one Spirit, one breath, one life, one energy in the universe. It belongs to none of us and all of us. We all share it. Spiritually does not make up otherworldly; it renders us more fully alive.” – Matthew Fox
35. “Facing the darkness, admitting the pain, allowing the pain to be pain, is never easy. This is why courage – big-heartedness – is the most essential virtue on the spiritual journey. But if we fail to let pain be pain – and our entire patriarchal culture refuses to let this happen – then pain will haunt us in nightmarish ways. We will become pain’s victims instead of the healers we might become.” – Matthew Fox
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36. “Animals love. They love their being. They strive to survive, to celebrate, to propagate. So certainly something we learn from animals is love. To survive and to celebrate, propagate, and to love life. To be the best we can be – the right to be here and the responsibility to be the best dog or bear or horse that they can be. Humans have the tendency to self-pity that other animals don’t indulge in.” – Matthew Fox
37. “I put a lot of pressure on myself and I think I am quite… well, intense about driving other people.” – Matthew Fox
38. “A job is something we do to get a paycheck and pay our bills. Jobs are legitimate, at times, but work is why we are here in the universe. Work and calling often go together.” – Matthew Fox
39. “I don’t think that fundamentalism has anything to do with Jesus Christ. They call themselves Christians, but if that’s Christian, count me out. Fundamentalism is built on fear and greed. They’re telling you to give them your money otherwise you’re going to hell.” – Matthew Fox
