Top 160 Edith Eger Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “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

52. “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

53. “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

54. “Survivors don’t have time to ask, “Why me?” For survivors, the only relevant question is, “What now?”

— Edith Eger

55. “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

56. “Feelings are energy. With feelings there’s no way out but through. We have to be with them. It takes so much courage to be, without having to do anything about anything – to just simply be.”

— Edith Eger

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

— Edith Eger

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

— Edith Eger

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

— Edith Eger

60. “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

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

— Edith Eger

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

— Edith Eger

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

— Edith Eger

64. “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

65. “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

66. “I can see that Dr. Mengele, the seasoned killer who just this morning murdered my mother, is more pitiful than me. I am free in my mind, which he can never be. He will always have to live with what he’s done. He is more a prisoner than I am.”

— Edith Eger

67. “Con mucha frecuencia, nuestra infelicidad se debe a que estamos asumiendo demasiada responsabilidad o demasiado poca.”

— Edith Eger

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

— Edith Eger

69. “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

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

— Edith Eger

71. “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

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

— Edith Eger

73. “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

74. “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

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

— Edith Eger

76. “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

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

— Edith Eger

78. “A good definition of being a victim is when you keep the focus outside yourself, when you look outside yourself for someone to blame for your present circumstances, or to determine your purpose, fate, or worth.”

— Edith Eger

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

— Edith Eger

80. “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

81. “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

82. “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

83. “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

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

— Edith Eger

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

— Edith Eger

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

— Edith Eger

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

— Edith Eger

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

— Edith Eger

89. “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

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

— 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. “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

93. “Hope isn’t a distraction from darkness. It’s a confrontation with darkness.”

— Edith Eger

94. “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

95. “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

96. “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

97. “Caroline lived in the prison of trying to protect others from her feelings. The people who love us want the best for us. They don’t want us to hurt. And so it’s tempting to show them the version of ourselves they long to see. But when we deny or minimize what we’re feeling, it backfires.”

— Edith Eger

98. “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. In trying to combat my low self-esteem, I was actually reinforcing my sense of unworthiness. In learning to offer my patients total love and acceptance, I fortunately learned the importance of offering the same to myself.”

— Edith Eger

99. “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

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

— Edith Eger