Top 160 Edith Eger Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Hope isn’t a distraction from darkness. It’s a confrontation with darkness.”

— Edith Eger

102. “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

103. “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

104. “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

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

— Edith Eger

106. “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

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. 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

108. “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

109. “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

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. “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

112. “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

113. “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

114. “And you can give her that gift. Have a full life. Celebrate. Your whole life is ahead of you now. I see her winking at you, encouraging you. So show up for your sisters and your husband. Love each other. And when you’re ninety-two you can think of me, and how your life began when your precious mother died and you made the decision to have a full life, and not be a victim of any circumstance. It’s your job now to give her a gift: let go. Let go.”

— Edith Eger

115. “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

116. “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

117. “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

118. “Try this instead. Acknowledge the feeling. It’s grief. It’s fear. It’s sadness. Just acknowledge it. And then give up the need for others’ approval. They can’t live your life. They can’t feel your feelings.”

— Edith Eger

119. “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

120. “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

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

— Edith Eger

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

— Edith Eger

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

— Edith Eger

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

— Edith Eger

125. “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

126. “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

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

— Edith Eger

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

— Edith Eger

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

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

— 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. “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

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

— Edith Eger

136. “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

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

— Edith Eger

138. “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

139. “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

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

— Edith Eger

141. “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

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

— Edith Eger

143. “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

144. “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

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

— Edith Eger

146. “We Hungarians can’t end a night of drinking without eating sauerkraut soup. Mariska brings steaming bowls of it.”

— Edith Eger

147. “Only after many years did I come to understand that running away doesn’t heal pain. It makes the pain worse. In America I was farther geographically than I had ever been from my former prison. But here I became more psychologically imprisoned than I was before. In running from the past – from my fear – I didn’t find freedom. I made a cell of my dread and sealed the lock with silence.”

— Edith Eger

148. “To be a hero requires taking effective action at crucial junctures in our lives, to make an active attempt to address injustice or create positive change in the world.”

— Edith Eger

149. “But now I know that instead of dying for my dead, I can live for them.”

— Edith Eger

150. “But here I became more psychologically imprisoned than I was before. In running from the past – from my fear – I didn’t find freedom. I made a cell of my dread and sealed the lock with silence.”

— Edith Eger