Ken Wilber Quotes

Quotes by and about Ken Wilber

(Continued from his main entry on the site.)

Wilber: "From about age four or five on. ... I was very sociable and really liked it. The hardest thing about starting writing, when I was twenty-three, was that I had to stop being with people. My ... adult life [of] reading, writing [and] meditating ... was really a hard transition for me."

Wilber: "Because I had some new ideas, relatively interesting ideas, I felt I should communicate them. And to communicate them I had to write them down. But I didn't particularly enjoy that part."

Wilber: "I basically taught myself how to write using Alan Watts' books. Alan Watts was one of the clearest writers I had read. He is really a great, clear, elegant writer."

Wilber: "Back [in the day] there were no meditation centers, there was basically nothing like that. But there was Krishnamurti, there was Alan Watts, and there was D.T. Suzuki, who was writing about Zen Buddhism. And I just caught hold of those books. As soon as I read a few sentences I knew that that was what I was going to do - study these higher waves of knowing and being. I felt very certain about that."

Wilber: "Strange as it might sound, I have thought very much about moving into writing novels. First of all, novels don't have footnotes. Every now and then you simply get tired of having to prove every sentence you utter. I [would rather] simply suggest a world without having to prove it! But more than that, narrative is an extremely powerful form of communication."

Wilber: "I continue to change because I'm open to new ideas. ... Basically, I've taken the answers that have been given by the great sages, saints and philosophers and have worked them into this integral framework."

Wilber: "Here's what we are faced with: If [my theory] has any validity, it ought to apply to every aspect of human endeavor. It ought to have something interesting to say about [everything] from physics to psychology, from philosophy to politics, from cosmology to consciousness. ... The [theory] must be able to tie together an enormous number of disciplines into a fairly complete, coherent, plausible, believable vision. ... That is what [I've attempted] to do."

Wilber: "All I've done is provide a map. [I'm] always updating it, always revising it, based on criticism and feedback and new evidence. You see those maps that Columbus and the early explorers drew of North and South America, where Florida is the size of Greenland? That's how [my] maps are."

Rollo May: "Ken Wilber is the most passionate philosopher I know."