Matthew Fox Quotations

If you look closely at a tree you'll notice it's knots and dead branches, just like our bodies. What we learn is that beauty and imperfection go together wonderfully.

Im not really a tropical paradise kind of person.

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.

To connect with the great river we all need a path, but when you get down there there's only one river.

Do not confuse beauty with beautiful. Beautiful is a human judgment. Beauty is All. The difference is everything.

We are in the cosmos and the cosmos is in us.

I'm really enjoying the process of learning to fly. How it will fit into my life down the road - I'm looking forward to discovering that.

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.

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.

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.

I turn a lot of stuff down - big, big movies, the kind I wouldn't want to go to the cinema to see.

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.

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.

When it comes to wilderness animals we have to make an effort to preserve what areas we can that they can be themselves in. Its come to a point though, clearly, where some species have to be cared for by humans if they are not going to disappear altogether.

I think that there's a hidden darkness in all of us!

I think you've got to take your time and make sure you're making choices that are smart for you.

Creation is all space, all time - all things past, present, and future.

Filmmaking is always sort of building a mosaic of this arc of what the character is going through.

Sometimes people look to others for answers they can find within themselves. I don't really want the responsibility of being the guy they look to.

I directed an episode of 'Party of Five' toward the very end of that show. It was a great experience.

I've always been into cars. Cars are part of our genetic makeup. It's unavoidable.

And as I've gotten deeper into the process of making films and television and such, I think I have more trust in the fact that you really never know what you're going to find after the twenty-fifth take.

I am a Westerner. We're not going to change the West by going East. The East has a lot to teach us, but essentially it's like a mirror, saying, hey, can't you see what's here in your own religion, what are you, stupid?

I put a lot of pressure on myself and I think I am quite... well, intense about driving other people.

I'm sorry, but I can't make a movie with the blonde from 'ER' who is starring in every single bad romantic comedy.

We've been 40 days on this island dealing with very intense things and not a lot of room for romance. Anytime people are in extreme circumstances, there has to be moments where people need physical contact and a feeling of being safe.

We're hoping one day we'll have our own property and build us a building.

When the show was picked up for 13 episodes and we knew we were moving there, my daughter Kyle started crying. She said they were tears of happiness.

Lost ... You look great, baby. Your dress is lovely.

Left to my own imagination, I could never have composed a scenario that was anywhere as interesting as my life has been: starting out as an eager altar boy, a good Boy Scout, a relatively docile Dominican brother and priest, receiving an advanced degree in spirituality, teaching bishops and many others around the world about our Western spiritual tradition, and then ending up being expelled from the Dominican order.

My generation was bold enough to question many things and to seek spirituality over religion. We haven't succeeded in overthrowing the old order yet, and maybe there are some meanings to be found in my story about coming of age spiritually in the latter half of the twentieth century.

No, I didn't expect this to happen. Historically, shows do not win the Emmy in their first year, ... I've been very selective about what roles I've decided to take, from 'Party of Five' to 'Lost.'

But, sooner or later I'd love to do a comedy. I mean I think that, you know, people don't think that that's in my wheelhouse because I've sort of played a lot of dramatic stuff and that's certainly a side of myself that I want at some point in the right context, in the right stuff, that I find really funny.

I'm a huge football fan. I played football through college so I know the game well.

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.

Jack is a very scientific man, very logical and obviously with everything he has seen on this island, he's going to have to find a way to snap out of this denial and start confronting this real reality he's existing in.

I thought we were going to be inside, ... I hope everybody brought bug spray.

I think when people watch this show and get to the end of the episode, they're dying to find out what's going to happen next week and they really don't have any idea.

I think that the Vatican is in a deep crisis of faith which they should be praying for. They don't trust theologians, they don't trust women, they don't trust gays and they don't trust nature. The rest of us who do and who are looking for answers should just get on with the work.

Our generation has been taught to think in terms of the evolution of the universe, but the fact is that physics didn't get into evolution until the 1960's - it was just this biology thing. Then we learned how the universe is evolving. Now we're going a step further and understanding that even the laws that govern the universe are evolving!

I suppose the stories are physically and metaphorically at the places that define what Canada is,

Just because a middle-aged woman in a small Ontario town and a young gay man in a city have obvious differences doesn't mean they can't be extremely similar in terms of their existential lives, or in the way that they go about doing whatever it is they go about doing, be it sodomy or dusting, ... If you are bored with those activities, you may end up having similar reflections about them -- or they might be placeholders, or become obsessions.

We were made for something cosmic and will not fit peacefully into anything much smaller. And when we try to build our lives around anything much smaller than cosmos we become grotesque, and our institutions, be they religious or familial or educational or governmental are asked to do too much. They become misshapen and malformed and turn into instruments of cosmic and personal destruction.

To get this award right now right before our second season kicks off is incredibly exciting and puts us in a really good spot.

People ought to tithe because they belong to a community that they believe in and they want to see prosper. Tithing is a form of voluntary taxation. In our culture, we should spend more time thinking in communitarian terms about taxation.

Compassion is the essence of Jesus' teaching, and indeed of the teaching of all great spiritual figures from Mohammed to Isaiah, from Lao Tzu to Chief Seattle. Yet compassion has been sentimentalized and severed from its relationship to justice-making and celebration. Creation Spirituality links the struggle for justice with the yearning for mysticism.

Any time I need to be really physical, and a role requires that, you're kind of viscerally activated by being that physical in it. It takes away the thought process, which is fun.

It's a beautiful way to work. As an actor you don't have to trick yourself if you only know as much as your character knows. So I look forward to the scripts like the audience looks forward to the episodes.

It's cool. You get a lot of people you don't usually see together. We're excited to see how it's going to play out.

I want to give people a sense of who he is, who he was, and how he dealt with the situation. It's an honor to do him and his story. I'm hoping to do my part justice. I'll leave everything on the field as they say.

If you look at men's roles for the last thousand years, the desire is fundamental. We want to take care of, provide for, and be of service to... women.

I reject the notion of talking about God as a person, but there's a difference between talking about God as a person and talking about God as personal. The term I use is pantheistic - everything is in God and God is in everything. That's pretty intimate, but it doesn't mean that we don't have to find our own way and do our own creating. I see the universe as a Divine womb and we're all swimming around in this soup.

Inner work is finding joy in work. Our real work is heart work and soul work.

It has taken fifteen billion years to get you here. That is scientific fact. We are not just the products of our parents. Sixty percent of our body is hydrogen atoms. The hydrogen atoms in us go back to the fireball fourteen billion years ago. We have been around a long time, and it has been a great birthing process to bring us forward.

I played football for a huge portion of my life, all the way through college actually.

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.

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.

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.

After 'Lost', I never need to take a job for the money again.

I'll put it to you this way: I never, ever think about the things that I get involved with on a macro means-to-an-ends scale.

I'm an actor. I try to play a character in a really cool story, the very best I can.

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.

The only way to learn compassion is through your heart; you have to back up and pass through your own pain.

What is of most moment of compassion is not feelings of pity but feelings of togetherness.

By cutting ourselves off from the rest of creation, we are left bereft of awe and wonder and therefore of reverence and gratitude. We violate our very beings, and we have nothing but trivia to teach our young.

Cars are part of our genetic makeup. It's unavoidable.

I'm either going to have the career I want doing films, or I'll do something else - I'll be gone.

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.

To create is always to learn, to begin over, to begin at zero.

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.

Political movements for justice are part of the fuller development of the cosmos, and nature is the matrix in which humans come to their self-awareness of their power to transform. Liberation movements are a fuller development of the cosmos's sense of harmony, balance, justice, and celebration. This is why true spiritual liberation demands rituals of cosmic celebrating and healing, which will in turn culminate in personal transformation and liberation.

The system is not working. That is how a paradigm shift begins: the established way of seeing the world no longer functions.

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.

Pain destroys the illusions of false, that is, elitist pleasures. It burns from the inside out. It, therefore, sensitizes us to what is truly beautiful in life.

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.

Sustainability is another word for justice, for what is just is sustainable and what is unjust is not.

Animals teach us about the animals in ourselves. We need their spirits.

We all share beauty. It strikes us indiscriminately. There is no end to the beauty for the person who is aware. Even the cracks between the sidewalk contain geometric patterns of amazing beauty. If we take pictures of them and blow up the photographs, we realize we walk on beauty every day, even when things seem ugly around us.

Our self-expression is meant to be a manifestation of the silence of our hearts.

When the Sacred Masculine is combined with the sacred feminine inside each of us, we create the 'sacred marriage' of compassion and passion in ourselves.

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.

Today's Catholic church seems to reward authoritarian personalities who are clearly ill, violent, sexually obsessed and unable to remember the past.

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.

Awe is the beginning of wisdom. Awe is the beginning of education.

There is no end to the beauty for the person who is aware. Even the cracks between the sidewalk contain geometric patterns of amazing beauty.

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.

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.

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.

Humor and paradox are often the only ways to respond to life's sorrow with grace.

Big-heartednes s is the most essential virtue on the spiritual journey.

It is precisely the despair of our times that convinces me that a renaissance is right around the corner.

The prophets preach . . . that pleasure, not will-power and coercion, is how you most deeply transform people.

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.

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.

Work should be in order to live. We don't live in order to work. That shift in awareness is necessary.

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.

Prayer is essentially about making the heart strong so that fear cannot penetrate there.

We must work on our souls, enlarging and expanding them. We do so by experiencing all of life-the beauty and the joy as well as the grief and pain. Soul work requires paying attention to life, to the laughter and the sorrow, the enlightening and the frightening, the inspiring and the silly.

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.

A global awakening can only happen from a spiritual awakening that is of global dimensions.