Top 160 Edith Eger Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “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

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

— Edith Eger

103. “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

104. “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

105. “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

106. “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

107. “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

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

— Edith Eger

109. “I release you!” I shout to that old sorrow. “I release you!”

— Edith Eger

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

— Edith Eger

111. “Siempre hay dos mundos. El que elijo y el que niego, que entra siempre sin mi permiso.”

— Edith Eger

112. “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

113. “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

114. “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

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

— Edith Eger

116. “This is when I start to see that it can always be so much worse. That every moment harbors a potential for violence. We never know when or how we will break. Doing what you’re told might not save you.”

— Edith Eger

117. “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

118. “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

119. “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

120. “Resolving grief means both to release ourselves from responsibility for all the things that weren’t up to us and to come to terms with the choices we’ve made that can’t be undone.”

— Edith Eger

121. “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. Why do we so often struggle to feel alive, or distance ourselves from feeling life fully?”

— Edith Eger

122. “But closure is temporary. It’s not over till it’s over.”

— Edith Eger

123. “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

124. “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

125. “Denial is our shield. We don’t yet know the damage we perpetuate by cutting ourselves off from the past, by maintaining our conspiracy of silence. We are convinced that the more securely we lock the past away, the safer and happier we will be.”

— Edith Eger

126. “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

127. “Freedom lies in examining the choices available to us and examining the consequences of those choices.”

— Edith Eger

128. “Nothing is gained if we close our eyes to wrong, if we give someone a pass, if we dismiss accountability. But as my fellow survivors taught me, you can live to avenge the past, or you.”

— Edith Eger

129. “Los sentimientos, por muy intensos que sean, no son fatales.”

— Edith Eger

130. “But if you’re perfectionistic, you’re going to procrastinate, because perfect means never.”

— Edith Eger

131. “I don’t want you to hear my story and say, “My own suffering is less significant.” I want you to hear my story and say, “If she can do it, then so can I!”

— Edith Eger

132. “Only after many years did I come to understand that running away doesn’t heal pain. It makes the pain worse.”

— Edith Eger

133. “Another tool for moving out of victimhood is to learn to cope with loneliness. It’s what most of us fear more than anything else. But when you’re in love with yourself, alone doesn’t mean lonely.”

— Edith Eger

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

— Edith Eger

135. “I want to make one thing perfectly clear. When I talk about victims and survivors, I am not blaming victims – so many of whom never had a chance.”

— Edith Eger

136. “I can’t ignore the grief, but I can’t seem to expel it either.”

— Edith Eger

137. “It seemed a just and simple equation. Thousands of miles of ocean separated us from barbed wire, police searches, camps for the condemned, camps for the displaced. I did not yet know that nightmares know no geography, that guilt and anxiety wander borderless.”

— Edith Eger

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

— Edith Eger

139. “But I don’t let my students know how deeply I identify with them, how hate obliterated my childhood, how I know the darkness that eats you when you’ve been taught to believe that you don’t matter. I remember the voice that rose up through the Tatra Mountains, If you’re going to live, you have to stand for something. My students give me something to stand for. But I am still numb and anxious, isolated, so brittle and sad.”

— Edith Eger

140. “We turn off the lights when Marianne goes to bed and we sit in the dark. The silence between us isn’t the intimate kind, it’s taut and burdened, a rope beginning to fray under the weight of its load.”

— Edith Eger

141. “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

142. “Why is today different from tomorrow? Sometimes our pain pushes us, and sometimes our hope pulls us. Asking “Why now?” isn’t just asking a question – it’s asking everything.”

— Edith Eger

143. “We can stop burdening and pressuring ourselves, telling ourselves that something is necessary for our survival when it isn’t. And we can stop looking at our choices as obligations.”

— Edith Eger

144. “Yet leaving would require her to exchange a known reality for an unknown one. This is usually what stops us from taking risks. We’d rather stick with what we know, painful or untenable as it is, than face what we don’t know. When you risk, you don’t know how it will turn out. It’s possible that you won’t get what you want, that things will be worse. But you’ll still be better off, because you’ll be living in the world as it is, not in an imaginary reality created by your fear.”

— Edith Eger

145. “All of the survivors I met had one thing in common with me and with one another: We had no control over the most consuming facts of our lives, but we had the power to determine how we experienced life after trauma. Survivors could continue to be victims long after the oppression had ended, or they could learn to thrive. In my dissertation research, I discovered and articulated my personal conviction and my clinical touchstone: We can choose to be our own jailors, or we can choose to be free.”

— Edith Eger

146. “Thank you for life, and for the ability to finally accept the life that is.”

— Edith Eger

147. “I don’t immediately recognize this feeling. Then I remember. This is what it feels like to be happy.”

— Edith Eger

148. “But when we ask why, we’re stuck searching for someone or something to blame – including ourselves.”

— Edith Eger

149. “When we live in the prison of judgment, we don’t just victimize others. We victimize ourselves.”

— Edith Eger

150. “What is mine to do with the life I’ve been given?”

— Edith Eger