Edith Eger Quotes

There is no hierarchy of suffering. There's nothing that makes my pain worse or better than yours.

I want to make one thing perfectly clear. When I talk about victims and survivors, I am not blaming victims -- so many of whom never had a chance.

As long as we live, there's the risk that you might suffer more. There's also the opportunity to find a way to suffer less, to choose happiness, which requires taking responsibility for yourself.

...I understood that feelings, no matter how powerful, aren't fatal. And they are only temporary. Suppressing the feelings only makes it harder to let them go. Expression is the opposite of depression.

I can make the choice that all of us can make, I can't ever change the past but there is a light I can safe, it is mine, the one that I am living right now… this precious moment…

Perfectionism is the belief that something is broken - you. So you dress up your brokenness with degrees, achievements, accolades, pieces of paper, none of which can fix what you think you are fixing.

The worst transgression would be to relinquish my curiosity, I convince myself.

Doing what is right is rarely the same as doing what is safe.

You can live to avenge the past, or you can live to enrich the present.

When you can't go in through a door, go in through a window

Love means letting go. Love is forgiving yourself.

...(S)uffering is universal. But victimhood is optional. There is a difference between victimization and victimhood. We are all likely to victimized in some way in the course of our lives. At some point we will suffer some kind of affliction or calamity or abuse, caused by circumstances or people or institutions over which we have little or no control. This is life. And this is victimization. It comes from outside. It's the neighborhood bully, the boss who rages, the spouse who hits, the lover who cheats, the discriminatory law, the accident that lands you in the hospital.

In contrast, victimhood comes from the inside. No one can make you a victim but you. We become victims not because of what happens to us but when we choose to hold on to our victimization. We develop a victim's mind -- a way of thinking and being that is rigid, blaming, pessimistic, stuck in the past, unforgiving, punitive, and without healthy limits or boundaries. We become our own jailors when we choose the confines of the victim's mind.

I don't want you to hear my story and say, "My own suffering is less significant." I want you to hear my story and say, "If she can do it, then so can I!

Survivors don't have time to ask, "Why me?" For survivors, the only relevant question is, "What now?

For me, learning that only I can do what I can do the way I can it meant overthrowing the compulsive achiever in me, who was always chasing more and more pieces of paper in the hops of affirming my worth.

Romantic love is temporary. Real love is not what you feel, it's what you do.

Editke," my teacher says, "all your ecstasy in life is going to come from the inside." It will take me years to really understand what he means.

The second step in the dance of freedom is learning how to take risks that are necessary to true self-realization.

Not: Why did I live? But: What is mine to do with the life I've been given?