Top 160 Edith Eger Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 3 of 4

101. “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

102. “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

103. “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

104. “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

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

— Edith Eger

106. “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

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

— Edith Eger

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

— Edith Eger

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

— Edith Eger

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

— Edith Eger

111. “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

112. “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

113. “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

114. “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

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

— Edith Eger

116. “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

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

— Edith Eger

118. “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

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

— Edith Eger

120. “When we’re in the habit of denying our feelings, it can be hard even to identify what we’re feeling, much less face it, express it, and finally release.”

— Edith Eger

121. “Why miss anyone in particular when everyone has so many to mourn?”

— Edith Eger

122. “Viktor Frankl’s brilliant classic Man’s Search for.”

— Edith Eger

123. “Victimhood is rigor mortis of the mind. It’s stuck in the past, stuck in the pain, and stuck on the losses and deficits: what I can’t do and what I don’t have.”

— Edith Eger

124. “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

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

— Edith Eger

126. “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

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

— Edith Eger

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

— Edith Eger

129. “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

130. “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

131. “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

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

— Edith Eger

133. “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

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

— Edith Eger

135. “There is no haven free of limitation, of prejudice.”

— Edith Eger

136. “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

137. “What are you going to do about it? I believe in the power of positive thinking – but change and freedom also require positive action. Anything we practice, we become better at.”

— Edith Eger

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

— Edith Eger

139. “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

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. “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

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

— Edith Eger

143. “It’s our responsibility to act in service of our authentic selves. Sometimes this means giving up the need to please others, giving up our need for others’ approval.”

— Edith Eger

144. “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

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

— Edith Eger

146. “Freedom is a lifetime practice – a choice we get to make again and again each day.”

— Edith Eger

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

— Edith Eger

148. “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

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

— Edith Eger

150. “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