Top 160 Edith Eger Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Con mucha frecuencia, nuestra infelicidad se debe a que estamos asumiendo demasiada responsabilidad o demasiado poca.”

— Edith Eger

52. “When we abdicate taking responsibility for ourselves, we are giving up our ability to create and discover meaning. In other words, we give up on life.”

— Edith Eger

53. “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

54. “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

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

— Edith Eger

56. “But we can choose to be free, to escape the past, no matter what befalls us, and to embrace the possible. I invite you to make the choice to be free.”

— Edith Eger

57. “I also want to say that there is no hierarchy of suffering. There’s nothing that makes my pain worse or better than yours, no graph on which we can plot the relative importance of one sorrow versus another.”

— Edith Eger

58. “Silent rage is self-destructive. If you’re not actively, consciously, intentionally releasing it, you’re holding on to it. And that’s not going to do you any good.”

— Edith Eger

59. “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

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

— Edith Eger

61. “I worked to develop an inner voice that offered an alternative story. This is temporary, I’d tell myself. If I survive today, tomorrow I will be free.”

— Edith Eger

62. “Whatever you practice, you become better at. If.”

— Edith Eger

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

— Edith Eger

64. “But over time I learned that I can choose how to respond to the past. I can be miserable, or I can be hopeful – I can be depressed, or I can be happy. We always have that choice, that opportunity for control. I’m here, this is now, I have learned to tell myself, over and over, until the panicky feeling begins to ease.”

— Edith Eger

65. “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

66. “But from this moment on, I understood that feelings, no matter how powerful, aren’t fatal. And they are temporary.”

— Edith Eger

67. “Tenemos la capacidad de odiar y la capacidad de amar. Lo que escojamos, nuestro Hitler o nuestro ten Boom, depende de nosotros.”

— Edith Eger

68. “We always have that choice, that opportunity for control. I’m here, this is now, I have learned to tell myself, over and over, until the panicky feeling begins to ease.”

— Edith Eger

69. “The hardest person to forgive is someone I’ve still to confront: myself.”

— Edith Eger

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

— Edith Eger

71. “But you’re lying. You’re not being the whole you to your family. You’re depriving yourself of freedom. And you’re depriving them, too. Your strategy for dealing with your difficult emotions has become another problem.”

— Edith Eger

72. “Maybe every life is a study of the things we don’t have but wish we did, and the things we have but wish we didn’t.”

— Edith Eger

73. “When you turn the other cheek, you look at the same thing from a new perspective. You can’t change the situation, you can’t change someone else’s mind, but you can look at reality differently. You can accept and integrate multiple points of view. This flexibility.”

— Edith Eger

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

— Edith Eger

75. “It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us, Viktor Frankl writes in Man’s Search for Meaning.”

— Edith Eger

76. “I’d been liberated from the concentration camps of the Holocaust. Today, more than seventy years have passed. What happened can never be forgotten and can never be changed. But over time I learned that I can choose how to respond to the past. I can be miserable, or I can be hopeful – I can be depressed, or I can be happy. We always have that choice, that opportunity for control. I’m here, this is now, I have learned to tell myself, over and over, until the panicky feeling begins to ease.”

— Edith Eger

77. “In my first weeks at Auschwitz I learn the rules of survival. If you can steal a piece of bread from the guards, you are a hero, but if you steal from an inmate, you are disgraced, you die; competition and domination get you nowhere, cooperation is the name of the game; to survive is to transcend your own needs and commit yourself to someone or something outside yourself.”

— Edith Eger

78. “And you can’t feel love and fear at the same time.”

— Edith Eger

79. “Our painful experiences aren’t a liability – they’re a gift. They give us perspective and meaning, an opportunity to find our unique purpose and our strength.”

— Edith Eger

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

— Edith Eger

81. “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

82. “Taking risks doesn’t mean throwing ourselves blindly into danger. But it means embracing our fears so that we aren’t imprisoned by them.”

— Edith Eger

83. “Our childhoods end when we begin to live in someone else’s image of who we are.”

— Edith Eger

84. “Love means letting go. Love is forgiving yourself.”

— Edith Eger

85. “It’s a dangerous game to play what-if with the past.”

— Edith Eger

86. “I can’t grieve with my sisters, not explicitly. It’s too raw, too present. And to grieve with them seems like a defilement of the miracle of our togetherness. We never hold one another and cry.”

— Edith Eger

87. “I erupt in a wail. I think my chest will break. The blast of sorrow is so severe that tears won’t come – only a jagged moaning in my throat.”

— Edith Eger

88. “The ultimate key to freedom is to keep becoming who you truly are.”

— Edith Eger

89. “Think of the family as a car where all the wheels are integrated and work together to move where it needs to go – no one wheel takes control, no one wheel bears all the weight.”

— Edith Eger

90. “This embarrassment, this feeling of exile, even in my own community, didn’t come from without. It came from within. It was the self-imprisoning part of me that believed I didn’t deserve to have survived, that I would never be worthy enough to belong.”

— Edith Eger

91. “No podemos decidir tener una vida sin dolor. Pero podemos decidir ser libres, escapar del pasado, nos suceda lo que nos suceda, y adaptarnos a lo posible. Te invito a que decidas ser libre.”

— Edith Eger

92. “To forgive is to grieve – for what happened, for what didn’t happen – and to give up the need for a different past.”

— Edith Eger

93. “And you can give her that gift. Have a full life. Celebrate. Your whole life is ahead of you now. I see her winking at you, encouraging you. So show up for your sisters and your husband. Love each other. And when you’re ninety-two you can think of me, and how your life began when your precious mother died and you made the decision to have a full life, and not be a victim of any circumstance. It’s your job now to give her a gift: let go. Let go.”

— Edith Eger

94. “To be a hero requires great moral courage. And each of us has an inner hero waiting to be expressed. We are all “heroes in training.” Our hero training is life, the daily circumstances that invite us to practice the habits of heroism: to commit daily deeds of kindness; to radiate compassion, starting with self-compassion; to bring out the best in others and ourselves; to sustain love, even in our most challenging relationships; to celebrate and exercise the power of our mental freedom.”

— Edith Eger

95. “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.”

— Edith Eger

96. “What are you going to do about it? I believe in the power of positive thinking – but change and freedom also require positive action. Anything we practice, we become better at.”

— Edith Eger

97. “Try this instead. Acknowledge the feeling. It’s grief. It’s fear. It’s sadness. Just acknowledge it. And then give up the need for others’ approval. They can’t live your life. They can’t feel your feelings.”

— Edith Eger

98. “No more don’t, don’t, don’t,” I told her. “I want to give you lots of dos. I do have a choice. I do have a life to live. I do have a role. I do live in the present. I do pay attention to what I’m focusing on, and it’s definitely in alignment with the goals I’m choosing: what gives me pleasure, what gives me joy.”

— Edith Eger

99. “At best, revenge is useless. It can’t alter what was done to us, it can’t erase the wrongs we’ve suffered, it can’t bring back the dead. At worst, revenge perpetuates the cycle of hate. It keeps the hate circling on and on. When we seek revenge, even nonviolent revenge, we are revolving, not evolving.”

— Edith Eger

100. “Correr riesgos no significa lanzarnos a ciegas al peligro, sino asumir nuestros miedos para no ser prisioneros de ellos.”

— Edith Eger