Top 35 Brad Blanton Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Tell the truth. All the time. About everything. What’s the alternative to radical honesty? Waste. Wasted time, wasted money, wasted possibilities-a wasted life.”

— Brad Blanton

2. “The kind of lying that is most deadly is withholding, or keeping back information from someone we think would be affected by it.”

— Brad Blanton

3. “When you are lying, when you are keeping a secret, when you are withholding information or feelings in any moment, you are always doing that to protect something meaningless.”

— Brad Blanton

4. “Love is when you let someone be the way they are.”

— Brad Blanton

5. “Manipulation never works to get the result desired, but it always seems like it’s just about to work. When you get what you said you wanted by manipulation, it is never enough.”

— Brad Blanton

6. “It’s not normal to be honest. What is normal is to be concerned foremost with having a good cover story. Normal people are concerned with figuring out the right thing to say that puts them in the best light. They want to live up to their own best guess about what the people they are talking to want to hear.”

— Brad Blanton

7. “Therapy is over when a person stops incessantly demanding that other people be different from what they are, forgives his or her parents and other begrudged former intimates, reclaims the power to make life work, and takes responsibility for doing so.”

— Brad Blanton

8. “We learn to “act nice” and deny that we are angry, and we make ourselves sick in the process of denial. This is one of the main areas in which something we can’t tell the truth about ruins our lives.”

— Brad Blanton

9. “They concluded that every suicide can be explained as “an attempt to maintain or enhance the self.” The mind is maintained at the expense of the life of the being. The mind survives by being right. The mind would rather be right and die than be wrong and live.”

— Brad Blanton

10. “For my own good, I want to hang out with people who want to find out what it would be like to live in such a way as to leave no unspoken words, no unfinished business; I want to be with people who are hungry for the truth, who want to spend time learning and sharing what they have learned rather than defending their images or reputations.”

— Brad Blanton

11. “Meaninglessness is of great value. When you finally get that who you actually are is empty and meaningless, it doesn’t matter to you whether you are a jerk or not. There is where your power lives.”

— Brad Blanton

12. “Most of us would rather kill ourselves than be, particularly if who we think we are keeps dying. Many of us do.”

— Brad Blanton

13. “Your anger is unreasonable and unfair. Let it stay that way. Trying to make it seem reasonable – which usually consists of trying to make the resented person wrong – is the source of all the judgments and explanations that remove you further from the person and further from your experience of the sensations that arose in your body.”

— Brad Blanton

14. “Many of us won’t express anger with a loved one. We believe that if we expressed our resentment, it would destroy our relationship and our beloved would leave us.”

— Brad Blanton

15. “The problem is that ideas about forgiveness are not forgiveness. They don’t even help. What you are left with is the experience of resentment and the concept of forgiveness and a deteriorating relationship.”

— Brad Blanton

16. “These fantasies about the future, based on the past, are the hope and hype we con ourselves with. Even if we get what we always wanted it never looks like we thought it would when it arrives.”

— Brad Blanton

17. “The most wonderful thing about this whole process is that people’s contributions to the lives of others become the primary means of getting the results they want in their own lives.”

— Brad Blanton

18. “Love is when you let someone be the way she is. When you let up on your judgments of someone, there is a free space in which forgiveness and love occur.”

— Brad Blanton

19. “The stress that kills or cripples most of the population comes from people being too hard on themselves when they don’t live up to their own imaginings about how other people think they should behave.”

— Brad Blanton

20. “We all lie like hell. It wears us out. It is the major source of all human stress. Lying kills people.”

— Brad Blanton

21. “One of these games is called, “Okay, okay, I’m guilty.” This game is to make it look like you have taken responsibility for yourself when you haven’t. Admitting you are guilty is a great way to avoid being responsible.”

— Brad Blanton

22. “Whatever your main struggle is, it is insignificant in the face of your death; it is petty and unimportant and has no meaning at all. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

— Brad Blanton

23. “What is true changes, so we can’t tell the truth once and be done with it. It’s an ongoing game.”

— Brad Blanton

24. “You can be really mad at someone and hurt by him or her and stay stuck there. Or you can tell them and express it out loud and what was true a moment ago becomes no longer true.”

— Brad Blanton

25. “When incessant grieving occurs, it is usually out of the person’s attempt to handle anger by crying and feeling bad and having obsessional thoughts.”

— Brad Blanton

26. “When the truth changes from your speaking, you know you’ve spoken the truth.”

— Brad Blanton

27. “It may feel less secure than if everyone agrees on what is true, but the feeling of security is just that – a feeling, not the real thing. Less secure is often more reliable.”

— Brad Blanton

28. “We would rather be sure of a correctly predicted negative outcome than face the realistic uncertainty of an unpredictable future even if it includes the possibility of great joy and success.”

— Brad Blanton

29. “Dean Rusk never beat his wife. He was a decent man. He was a liberal. He was head of the Ford Foundation. And as Secretary of State during the Vietnam war, he killed over a hundred thousand people in a useless, wasteful, unnecessary, stupid war. We would all be better off if he had found a better way to express his anger. His time is passing with the turn of the century.”

— Brad Blanton

30. “It’s probably the meaning of the Resurrection: love dies to be reborn. When we let die our attachments to remembrances, expectations, moral imperatives, evaluations, comparisons, self-images, beliefs about how others should behave, ideals, and even romance, we make ourselves clearings for love’s rebirth.”

— Brad Blanton

31. “When you speak descriptively about a present-tense experience, and it changes, you have spoken the truth. It’s okay that it is no longer true. Don’t worry about it. It is the way things are, and it is fine that they are that way. It’s more fun and less boring than trying to keep track of everything. It’s called freedom.”

— Brad Blanton

32. “Taking responsibility means a person no longer blames outside circumstances, or other people, or past events for the conditions of his own life.”

— Brad Blanton

33. “You can still tell the truth by “pointing to” an abstraction or assessment of your mind, if your intent is simply to point out your thought, rather than to make the other person believe your thought to be the “right interpretation” of reality.”

— Brad Blanton

34. “Telling stories about your memory of what happened may be entertaining for a while, but if that is all you can do it gets boring pretty fast.”

— Brad Blanton

35. “Integrity, wholeness, at-one-ness, is the opposite of moralism. Having integrity is the opposite of being moral. If one has integrity, one doesn’t need morals. People with integrity operate with rules of thumb, not morals.”

— Brad Blanton