Top 160 Edith Eger Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “El tiempo no cura. Lo que cura es lo que haces con el tiempo.”

— Edith Eger

2. “Tempora mutantur, et nos mutamur in illis.”

— Edith Eger

3. “When you can’t go in through a door, go in through a window.”

— Edith Eger

4. “I can’t say that everything happens for a reason, that there’s a purpose in injustice or suffering. But I can say that pain, hardship, and suffering are the gift that helps us grow and learn and become who we are meant to be.”

— Edith Eger

5. “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.”

— Edith Eger

6. “Our best teachers. The most toxic, obnoxious people in our lives can be our best teachers. The next time you’re in the presence of someone who irks or offends you, soften your eyes and tell yourself, “Human, no more, no less. Human, like me.” Then ask, “What are you here to teach me?”

— Edith Eger

7. “Here you are! In the sacred present. I can’t heal you – or anyone – but I can celebrate your choice to dismantle the prison in your mind, brick by brick. You can’t change what happened, you can’t change what you did or what was done to you. But you can choose how you live now. My precious, you can choose to be free.”

— Edith Eger

8. “Romantic love is temporary. Real love is not what you feel, it’s what you do.”

— Edith Eger

9. “We can’t choose to vanish the dark, but we can choose to kindle the light.”

— Edith Eger

10. “Change is about noticing what’s no longer working and stepping out of the familiar, imprisoning patterns.”

— Edith Eger

11. “Our painful experiences aren’t a liability – they’re a gift.”

— Edith Eger

12. “Su mensaje es claro: tenemos la capacidad de escapar de las prisiones que construimos en nuestras mentes y podemos elegir ser libres, sean cuales sean las circunstancias de nuestra vida.”

— Edith Eger

13. “Not: Why did I live? But: What is mine to do with the life I’ve been given?”

— Edith Eger

14. “Just remember,” she says, “no one can take away from you what you’ve put in your mind.”

— Edith Eger

15. “Suppressing the feelings only makes it harder to let them go. Expression is the opposite of depression.”

— Edith Eger

16. “Freedom is a lifetime practice – a choice we get to make again and again each day. Ultimately, freedom requires hope, which I define in two ways: the awareness that suffering, however terrible, is temporary; and the curiosity to discover what happens next. Hope allows us to live in the present instead of the past, and to unlock the doors of our mental prisons.”

— Edith Eger

17. “I like to remind my patients: the opposite of depression is expression.”

— Edith Eger

18. “Forgiveness isn’t something we do for the person who’s hurt us. It’s something we do for ourselves, so we’re no longer victims or prisoners of the past, so we can stop carrying a burden that harbors nothing but pain.”

— Edith Eger

19. “My mama told me something I will never forget... “We don’t know where we’re going, we don’t know what’s going to happen, but no one can take away from you what you put in your own mind.”

— Edith Eger

20. “In Hungary we say, “Don’t inhale your anger to your breast.” It can be harmful to hold on to feelings and keep them locked inside.”

— Edith Eger

21. “When a child is grappling with anorexia, the identified patient is the child, but the real patient is the family.”

— Edith Eger

22. “But the voice insisted: Find the bigot in you. Find the part in you that is judging, assigning labels, diminishing another’s humanity, making others less than who they are.”

— Edith Eger

23. “Simplemente, recuerda: nadie puede quitarte lo que pones en tu mente.”

— Edith Eger

24. “We all have this capacity to choose. When nothing helpful or nourishing is coming from the outside, that is precisely the moment when we have the possibility to discover who we really are. It’s not what happens to us that matters most, it’s what we do with our experiences.”

— Edith Eger

25. “The truth is, we will have unpleasant experiences in our lives, we will make mistakes, we won’t always get what we want. This is part of being human. The problem – and the foundation of our persistent suffering – is the belief that discomfort, mistakes, disappointment signal something about our worth. The belief that the unpleasant things in our lives are all we deserve.”

— Edith Eger

26. “Magda was competitive and rebellious; I was the peacemaker, hustling between my sisters, soothing their conflicts, hiding my own thoughts. How easily we can make even the warmth and safety of family into a kind of prison. We rely on our old coping mechanisms. We become the person we think we need to be to please others. It takes willpower and choice not to step back into the confining roles we mistakenly believe will keep us safe and protected.”

— Edith Eger

27. “There is no hierarchy of suffering. There’s nothing that makes my pain worse or better than yours.”

— Edith Eger

28. “How can I be useful to you?” How can I support you as you take responsibility for yourself?”

— Edith Eger

29. “We’re all victims of victims. How far back do you want to go, searching for the source? It’s better to start with yourself.”

— Edith Eger

30. “But as long as you’re avoiding your feelings, you’re denying reality. And if you try to shut something out and say, “I don’t want to think about it,” I guarantee that you’re going to think about it. So invite the feeling in, sit down with it, keep it company. And then decide how long you’re going to hold on to it. Because you’re not a fragile little somebody. It’s good to face every reality. To stop fighting and hiding. To remember that a feeling is just a feeling – it’s not your identity.”

— Edith Eger

31. “In the war he wasn’t killing people; he was killing “gooks,” he was killing subhumans. Just as the Nazis weren’t killing people at the death camps; they were eradicating a cancer.”

— Edith Eger

32. “Sometimes it just takes one sentence to point the way out of victimhood: Is it good for me?”

— Edith Eger

33. “Sometimes our pain pushes us, and sometimes our hope pulls us.”

— Edith Eger

34. “When a couple tells me they never fight, I say, “Then you don’t have intimacy, either.” Conflict is human. When we avoid conflict, we’re actually moving closer to tyranny than to peace.”

— Edith Eger

35. “When did your childhood end? I often ask my patients.”

— Edith Eger

36. “We can choose what the horror teaches us. To become bitter in our grief and fear. Hostile. Paralyzed. Or to hold on to the childlike part of us, the lively and curious part, the part that is innocent.”

— Edith Eger

37. “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.”

— Edith Eger

38. “We are hungry. We are hungry for approval, attention, affection. We are hungry for the freedom to embrace life and to really know and be ourselves.”

— Edith Eger

39. “This is how we release ourselves from the prison of avoidance – we let the feelings come. We let them move through us. And then we let them go.”

— Edith Eger

40. “It took me many decades to discover that I could come at my life with a different question. Not: Why did I live? But: What is mine to do with the life I’ve been given?”

— Edith Eger

41. “No one heals in a straight line.”

— Edith Eger

42. “Hope is the boldest act of imagination I know.”

— Edith Eger

43. “Far from diminishing pain, whatever we deny ourselves the opportunity to accept becomes as inescapable as brick walls and steel bars. When we don’t allow ourselves to grieve our losses, wounds, and disappointments, we are doomed to keep reliving them.”

— Edith Eger

44. “Cuando tienes que demostrar algo, no eres libre.”

— Edith Eger

45. “The only place where we can exercise our freedom of choice is in the present.”

— Edith Eger

46. “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.”

— Edith Eger

47. “Doing what is right is rarely the same as doing what is safe.”

— Edith Eger

48. “Often, the little upsets in our lives are emblematic of the larger losses; the seemingly insignificant worries are representative of greater pain.”

— Edith Eger

49. “We all have a choice, to pay attention to what have lost or to put attention to what we still have...”

— Edith Eger

50. “Choice Therapy, as freedom is about CHOICE – about choosing compassion, humor, optimism, intuition, curiosity, and self-expression.”

— Edith Eger