Top 160 Edith Eger Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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

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

— Edith Eger

53. “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

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

— Edith Eger

55. “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

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

— Edith Eger

57. “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

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

— Edith Eger

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

— Edith Eger

60. “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

61. “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

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

— Edith Eger

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

— Edith Eger

64. “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. “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

66. “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

67. “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

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

— Edith Eger

70. “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

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

— Edith Eger

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

— Edith Eger

73. “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

74. “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

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

— Edith Eger

76. “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

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

— Edith Eger

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

— Edith Eger

79. “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

80. “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

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

— Edith Eger

83. “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

84. “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

85. “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

86. “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

87. “Isn’t it amazing?” she said. “The worst brings out the best in us.”

— Edith Eger

88. “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

89. “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

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

— Edith Eger

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

— Edith Eger

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

— Edith Eger

94. “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

95. “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

96. “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

97. “Even the dullest moments of our lives are opportunities to experience hope, buoyancy, happiness. Mundane life is life too. As is painful life, and stressful life.”

— Edith Eger

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

— Edith Eger

99. “What a beautiful reminder that the things that interrupt our lives, that stop us in our tracks, can also be catalysts for the emerging self, tools that show us a new way to be, that endow us with new vision.”

— Edith Eger

100. “It’s the first time I see that we have a choice: to pay attention to what we’ve lost or to pay attention to what we still have.”

— Edith Eger