Byron Katie Quotes

Nothing comes ahead of its time, and nothing ever happened that didn't need to happen.

Life is so simple: We walk; we sit; we lie horizontal. That's about it. Everything else is a story about what's going on while we're doing it.

If you want reality to be different than it is, you might as well try to teach a cat to bark.

Your True Nature Is Love. There's Nothing You Can Do About It.

Everyone in your life is a figment of your imagination
ev en you.

A teacher of fear can't bring peace on earth. We have been trying to do it that way for thousands of years. The person who turns inner violence around, the person who finds peace inside and lives it, is the one who teaches what true peace is. We are waiting for just one teacher. You're the one.

You can't have an up without a down. You can't have a left without a right. This is duality. If you have a problem, you must already have the solution. The question is, do you really want the solution, or do you want to perpetuate the problem?

You don't get to vote on what is. Have you noticed?

Any story that you tell about yourself causes suffering. There is no authentic story.

Our job is unconditional love. The job of everyone else in our life is to push our buttons.

You can't have your daughter as long as you have a concept of her. When you get rid of the concept, you meet your daughter for the first time. That's the way this works.

Love is action.
It's clear, it's kind, it's effortless, and it's irresistible.

If your beliefs are stressful and you question them, you come to see that they aren't true - whereas prior to questioning, you absolutely believe them. How can you live in joy when you're believing thoughts that bring on sadness, frustration, anger, alienation, and loneliness?

Life just happens. It's what you're believing about life that makes you suffer.

After you've been doing inquiry for a while, if you have the thought "She doesn't love me," you just get the immediate turnaround with a smile: "Oh, I'm not loving myself in this moment."

I am entirely motivated without anger. The truth sets us free, and freedom acts.

People try so hard to let go of their negative behaviors and thoughts, and it doesn't work, or it works only for a short time. I didn't let go of my negative thoughts; I questioned them, and then they let go of me, and so did my addictions and depression.

A lover of what is looks forward to everything: life, death, disease, loss, earthquakes, bombs, anything the mind might be tempted to call 'bad.' Life will bring us everything we need, to show us what we haven't undone yet. Nothing outside ourselves can make us suffer. Except for our unquestioned thoughts, every place is paradise.

Until the mind is open, the heart stays closed. The open mind is the key to the open heart.

Nothing belongs to me. Everything comes and goes. Serenity is an open door.

If we are in silence - in absolute silence with no thoughts - for 10 minutes, it's only a thought that tells us we were silent for 10 minutes. Our only proof is a thought.

Who would you be without your story?

I suffered from severe depression for over a decade. My condition deteriorated steadily. I was suicidal.

I teach people to question their thinking, and this changes their world.

All I have is all I need and all I need is all I have in this moment.

Self-realization is not complete until it lives in action.

Nothing you believe is true. To know
this is freedom.

Until you can see everything in the world as your friend, your work is not done.

People don't need sudden revelations. They get what they need when they need it, thought by thought by thought. It's a constant thing when the mind starts to wake up to itself.

Nothing outside you can ever give you what you're looking for.

I'll tell you that for me, one when someone used to say something that was true, one way I knew it was true was that I immediately felt defensive. I blocked it off, and I went to war with them in my mind and suffered all that goes with it. And they were only saying what was true.

The only difference between heaven and hell is believing a thought.

If you want to clean up the environment, start with your mind. It starts there!

Reality is always kinder than your thinking.

You've never reacted to someone else. You project meaning onto nothing. And you react to the meaning you've projected

Defense is the first act of war.

So what is it with your mother that you haven't worked out yet?

When the creative mind is unleashed and understands its true nature, it's unlimited. There's nothing you cannot do.

I see the goodness and beauty in everyone, and everything is a gift given for me and for all of us. If you don't love it, question your mind until you do.

Pay close attention to the particular thoughts you use to deprive yourself of happiness.

To argue with reality is to argue with God

Place only your kindest thoughts on everything you experience today. Meet yourself.

How do you react when you think you need people's love? Do you become a slave for their approval? Do you live an inauthentic life because you can't bear the thought that they might disapprove of you? Do you try to figure out how they would like you to be, and then try to become that, like a chameleon? In fact, you never really get their love. You turn into someone you aren't, and then when they say "I love you," you can't believe it, because they're loving a facade. They're loving someone who doesn't even exist, the person you're pretending to be. It's difficult to seek other people's love. It's deadly. In seeking it, you lose what is genuine. This is the prison we create for ourselves as we seek what we already have.

Reality doesn't wait for your opinion, vote, or permission, sweetheart. It just keeps being what it is and doing what it does.

Insanity is arguing with reality.

You're just suffering from the belief that there's something missing from your life. In reality, you always have what you need.

The only time we suffer is when we believe a thought that argues with what is. When the mind is perfectly clear, what is is what we want.

Personalities don't love.
They want something.

Being present means living without control and always having your needs met.

Every uncomfortable feeling, every pain, every moment of stress & suffering is for your own self-realizatio n.

That's the purpose of stress. It's a friend. It's an alarm clock, built in to let you know that it's time to do The Work.

With inquiry, every painful story unravels. Freedom is possible in every moment.

When you believe that your problem is caused by someone or something else, you become your own victim.

Mind is infinitely creative. And when it's not stuck, that's where the joy comes from. Something happens, and the way we think about it, understand it, see it, is actually hilarious, whereas before it used to depress us.

The opening to reality, as it really is, is beauty.

Don't be careful. You could hurt yourself.

There's never a mistake in the universe. So if your partner is angry, good. If there are things about him that you consider flaws, good, because these flaws are your own, you're projecting them, and you can write them down, inquire, and set yourself free. People go to India to find a guru, but you don't have to: you're living with one. Your partner will give you everything you need for your own freedom.

When you act like a teacher, it's usually because you're afraid to be the student.

Eating, drinking, and depression disorders are really thinking disorders.

When a thought appears such as "Do the dishes" and you don't do them, notice how an internal war breaks out ... The stress and weariness you feel are really mental combat fatigue.

You can't change what you haven't realized yet. Once you realize what you were asleep to, the change happens on its own.

Each time your mind changes your whole world is changed.

Whenever you think that your needs are not being met, you're telling the story of a future

That's what every uncomfortable feeling is for-that's what pain is for, what money is for, what everything in the world is for: your self-realization.

You would be amazed at who people are once you know yourself.

When I was in my early forties, I slept with a loaded gun under my bed. I'd become severely depressed in my thirties, and for almost a decade I spiraled down into paranoia, rage, self-loathing, and thoughts of suicide.

It's not possible to have a problem without believing a prior thought. To notice this simple truth is the beginning of peace.

The end of suffering happens in this very moment,
whether you're watching a terrorist attack or doing the dishes.
And compassion begins at home.
Because I don't believe my thoughts, sadness can't exist.
That's how I can go to the depths of anyone's suffering,
if they invite me, and take them by the hand and walk them out of it into the sunlight of reality.
I've taken that walk myself.

The ability to understand the cause of your own suffering gives you the ability to understand ours.

No-one can disappoint you, only your thoughts about them can

Mind changes, and as a result, the world changes. A clear mind heals everything that needs to be healed.

If people are living their lives for security and comfort and pleasure, then mind's every waking moment will be plotting those things. That's how it stays identified - as a body, as a you.

When safety is our priority, we live our lives being very, very careful, and we wind up having no lives

When you're focused outside and believe that your problem is caused by someone else, rather than by your attachment to the story you're believing in the moment, then you are your own victim, and the situation appears to be hopeless.

To think that I know what's best for anyone else is to be out of my business. Even in the name of love, it is pure arrogance, and the result is tension, anxiety, and fear. Do I know what's right for me? That is my only business. Let me work with that before I try to solve problems for you.

I use the word inquiry as synonymous with The Work ... Inquiry is a way to end confusion and to experience internal peace, even in a world of apparent chaos. Above all else, inquiry is about realizing that all the answers we ever need are always available inside us.

When we work with our thinking, then to have great wealth is the same as to have nothing. That's the only freedom.

It's our nature to be free, and until we're stuck in a stressful belief system, we're pretty happy.

In the fall, you don't grieve because the leaves are falling and dying. You say, "Isn't it beautiful!" Well, we're the same way. There are seasons. We all fall sooner or later. It's all so beautiful. And our concepts, without investigation, keep us from knowing this. It's beautiful to be a leaf, to be born, to fall, to give way to the next, to become food for the roots. It's life, always changing its form and always giving itself completely. We all do our part. No mistake.

The way to truly help someone is for me to not get immersed in their suffering.

I do whatever I can to serve peace. My job is the end of suffering.

If you're yelling within you that they shouldn't yell at you, that is where the pain begins, not with their yelling at you.

The Ego's job is to kill everything but itself

How do I know it was meant to happen this way? Because it did.

I used to sleep on the floor next to the bed, because I believed that I didn't even deserve a bed to sleep in. And then, one morning, a cockroach crawled onto my leg. I looked at it, and suddenly I awoke from a kind of hypnotic trance in which I had been all my life.

You cannot hurt me. Only I can do that.

We've been looking outside us for our own peace. We've been looking in the wrong direction.

A dishonest yes is a no to yourself.

For me, everything is God. Everything and everyone. So it was just, God needs me now, now, now.

I haven't had a single thought for 26 years. I have only understanding. It's somewhat complicated to understand that. I've hardly ever spoken about it. You're in a state of total peace of mind. A kind of nirvana.

There's no way that a clear mind can live an unhappy life.

Love asks for nothing. Only personalities want something.

It's only our story that keeps us from knowing that we always have everything we need.

I have never experienced a stressful feeling that wasn't caused by attaching to an untrue thought. Behind every uncomfortable feeling, there's a thought that isn't true for us.

That's where the fear comes from-from your uninvestigated thoughts.

I love the world, because I love the mind that created the world.

Forgiveness is discovering that what you thought happened, didn't.

If you think the cause of your problem is 'out there,' you'll try to solve it from the outside. Take the shortcut: solve it from within.

I came to see that there was nothing to forgive, that I was the one who caused my own problems.

Do you know anyone who hasn't changed his mind? This door was a tree, then it will be firewood for someone, then it will return to air and earth. We're all like that, constantly changing. It's simply honest to report that you've changed your mind when you have. When you're afraid of what people will think if you speak honestly, that's where you become confused.