Top 160 Edith Eger Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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

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

— Edith Eger

53. “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

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

— Edith Eger

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

— Edith Eger

56. “Mi primer paso de ese baile fue asumir la responsabilidad de mis sentimientos. Dejar de reprimirlos y evitarlos y dejar de culpar.”

— Edith Eger

57. “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

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

— Edith Eger

59. “No podemos borrar el dolor. Pero somos libres de aceptar lo que somos y lo que nos han hecho y avanzar.”

— Edith Eger

60. “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

61. “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

62. “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

63. “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

64. “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

65. “What’s the legacy you want to pass on? We can’t choose what our ancestors did, or what was done to them. But we get to create the recipe that’s handed down. Write a recipe for a life well-lived. Take the good things from your family’s past and add your own ingredients. Give the next generation something delicious and nourishing to build on.”

— Edith Eger

66. “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

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

— Edith Eger

68. “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

69. “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

70. “Time doesn’t heal. It’s what you do with the time. Healing is possible when we choose to take responsibility, when we choose to take risks, and finally, when we choose to release the wound, to let go of the past or the grief.”

— Edith Eger

71. “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

72. “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

73. “How easily we can cling to – worship – the choices we think we could or should have made. Could I have saved my mother? Maybe.”

— Edith Eger

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

— Edith Eger

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

— Edith Eger

76. “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

77. “Ser pasiva es permitir que otros decidan por ti. Ser agresiva es decidir por los otros. Ser asertiva es decidir por ti misma.”

— Edith Eger

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

— Edith Eger

79. “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

80. “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

81. “The past doesn’t taint the present, the present doesn’t diminish the past.”

— Edith Eger

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

— Edith Eger

83. “Whether imprisoned by bad marriages, destructive families, or jobs they hate, or imprisoned within the barbed wire of self-limiting beliefs that trap them in their own minds, readers will learn from this book that they can choose to embrace joy and freedom regardless of their circumstances.”

— Edith Eger

84. “Our ballet master reminded us that strength and flexibility are inseparable – for one muscle to flex, another must open; to achieve length and limberness, we have to hold our cores strong.”

— Edith Eger

85. “As long as I was holding on to that rage, I was in chains with him, locked in the damaging past, locked in my grief. To forgive is to grieve – for what happened, for what didn’t happen – and to give up the need for a different past. To.”

— Edith Eger

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

— Edith Eger

87. “Freedom lies in learning to embrace what happened. Freedom means we muster the courage to dismantle the prison, brick by brick.”

— Edith Eger

88. “Life will be good again.’ And you said, ‘If you can survive this, you can survive anything.”

— Edith Eger

89. “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

90. “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

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

— Edith Eger

92. “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

93. “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

94. “But a feeling is only a feeling. There’s no right or wrong. There’s just my feeling and yours.”

— Edith Eger

95. “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

96. “I believe that her inner voice of hope kept her alive, but when she lost hope she wasn’t able to keep living.”

— Edith Eger

97. “We don’t know where we’re going. We don’t know what’s going to happen. Just remember, no one can take away what you’ve put in your mind.”

— Edith Eger

98. “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

99. “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

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

— Edith Eger