Top 160 Edith Eger Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “The past doesn’t taint the present, the present doesn’t diminish the past.”

— Edith Eger

102. “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

103. “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

104. “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

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

— Edith Eger

106. “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

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

— Edith Eger

108. “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

109. “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

110. “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

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. “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

114. “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

115. “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

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

— Edith Eger

117. “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

118. “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

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

— Edith Eger

120. “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

121. “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

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

— Edith Eger

123. “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

124. “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

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

— Edith Eger

126. “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

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

— Edith Eger

128. “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

129. “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

130. “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

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

— Edith Eger

132. “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

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

— Edith Eger

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

— Edith Eger

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

— Edith Eger

136. “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

137. “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

138. “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

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

— Edith Eger

140. “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

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

— Edith Eger

142. “When we’ve been victimized, there’s a part of our psyche that identifies with the victimizer, and sometimes we adopt that punitive, victimizer stance toward ourselves, denying ourselves the permission to feel good, depriving ourselves of our birthright: joy.”

— Edith Eger

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

— Edith Eger

144. “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

145. “You need to push him to the level of his potential.”

— Edith Eger

146. “Words are treasures that I offer her again and again.”

— Edith Eger

147. “I don’t want to dream the wrong thing.”

— Edith Eger

148. “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

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

— Edith Eger

150. “At an insurance company, I am promoted from my station at the ditto machine to bookkeeper. My supervisor has noticed how hard I work, she will train me. I feel happy in the company of the other secretaries, happy to be one of them, until my new friend advises me, “Don’t ever sit next to the Jews at lunch. They smell.”

— Edith Eger