Marion Milner Quotations

The growth of understanding follows an ascending spiral rather than a straight line.

There seemed to be endless obstacles - it seemed that the root cause of them all was fear.

It's weak and despicable to go on wanting things and not trying to get them.

Sometimes I find that in my happy moments I could not believe that I had ever been miserable.

Once you assume your right to interfere in other people's problems they become in some ways more of a worry than your own, for with your own you can at least do what you think best, but other people always show such a persistent tendency to do the wrong thing.

I want to draw and study a few things closely by feeling, not thinking.

Love is not getting, but giving. It is sacrifice. And sacrifice is glorious!

Like a fierce wind roaring high up in the bare branches of trees, a wave of passion came over me, aimless but surging . . . I suppose it's lust, but it's awful and holy like thunder and lightning and the wind.

until you have, once at least, faced everything you know - the whole universe - with utter giving in, and let all that is 'not you' flow over and engulf you, there can be no lasting sense of security. Only by being prepared to accept annihilation can one escape from that spiritual 'abiding alone' which is in fact the truly death-like state.

I came to the conclusion then that "continual mindfulness". . . must mean, not a sergeantmajor-like drilling of thoughts, but a continual readiness to accept whatever came.

Perhaps if one really knew when one was happy one would know the things that were necessary in one's life.

Moments when the original 'poet' in each of us created the outside world for us, by finding the familiar in the unfamiliar, are perhaps forgotten by most people; or else they are guarded in some secret place of memory because they were too much like visitations by the gods to be mixed with everyday thinking.

Colour is, on the evidence of language alone, very bound up with the feelings.

I want to feel myself part of things, of the great drift and swirl: not cut off, missing things, like being sent to bed early as a child, the blinds being drawn while the sun and cheerful voices came through the chink from the garden.

The aim of the painting is that the eye should find out what it likes.

Happiness not only needs no justification, but it is also the only final test of whether what I am doing is right for me. Only of course happiness is not the same as pleasure; it includes the pain of losing as well as the pleasure of finding.

I used to worry about what life was for - now being alive seems sufficient reason.

by taking notice of those feelings and images that seemed to be in my blood and bones rather than in my head, I had found myself able to behave, not less reasonably, but more so. Apparently it was as much a false extreme to try and live by reason alone, leaving the passions out of count, as to ignore reason and put passion in its place as the guiding force of life.

I began to have an idea of my life, not as slow shaping of achievement to fit my preconceived purposes, but as the gradual discovery and growth of a purpose which I did not know.