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

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

— Edith Eger

53. “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

54. “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

55. “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

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

— 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. “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

59. “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

60. “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.”

— Edith Eger

61. “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

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

— Edith Eger

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

— 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. “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

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

— Edith Eger

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

— Edith Eger

68. “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

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

— Edith Eger

70. “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

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

— Edith Eger

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

— Edith Eger

73. “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

74. “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

75. “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

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

— Edith Eger

77. “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

78. “We cannot choose to have a life free of hurt. But we can choose to be free, to escape the past, no matter what befalls us, and to embrace the possible.”

— Edith Eger

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

— Edith Eger

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

— Edith Eger

81. “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

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

— Edith Eger

83. “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

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. “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

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

— Edith Eger

87. “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

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

— Edith Eger

89. “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

90. “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

91. “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

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

— Edith Eger

93. “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

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

— Edith Eger

95. “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

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. “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

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.”

— Edith Eger

99. “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

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

— Edith Eger