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Quotes by Matthew Fox

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
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
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
Another part of beauty is terror. The world isn't pretty, it's beautiful. Awe is a mixture of terror and beauty. You say that the opposite of beauty is ugliness. Right. I would say that all injustice is ugly, sin is ugly, tearing down the rainforest is ugly. To me, beauty is not about perfection, there's beauty in imperfection.
– Matthew Fox
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
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.
– Matthew Fox
Creation is all space, all time - all things past, present, and future.
– Matthew Fox
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
Do not confuse beauty with beautiful. Beautiful is a human judgment. Beauty is All. The difference is everything.
– Matthew Fox
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
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?
– Matthew Fox
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
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.
– Matthew Fox
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.
– Matthew Fox
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.
– Matthew Fox
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.
– Matthew Fox
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.
– Matthew Fox
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.
– Matthew Fox
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!
– Matthew Fox
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.
– Matthew Fox
To connect with the great river we all need a path, but when you get down there there's only one river.
– Matthew Fox
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
We are in the cosmos and the cosmos is in us.
– Matthew Fox
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.
– Matthew Fox
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.
– Matthew Fox
I'm sorry, but I can't make a movie with the blonde from 'ER' who is starring in every single bad romantic comedy.
– Matthew Fox
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.
– Matthew Fox
I'm an actor. I try to play a character in a really cool story, the very best I can.
– Matthew Fox
I turn a lot of stuff down - big, big movies, the kind I wouldn't want to go to the cinema to see.
– Matthew Fox
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
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.
– Matthew Fox
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.
– Matthew Fox