Top 160 Edith Eger Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “Freedom lies in learning to embrace what happened. Freedom means we muster the courage to dismantle the prison, brick by brick.”

— Edith Eger

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

— Edith Eger

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

— Edith Eger

104. “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

105. “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

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

— Edith Eger

107. “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

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

— Edith Eger

109. “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

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

— Edith Eger

111. “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

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

— Edith Eger

113. “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

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

— Edith Eger

115. “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

116. “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

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

— Edith Eger

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

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

— Edith Eger

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

— Edith Eger

123. “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

124. “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

125. “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

126. “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

127. “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

128. “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

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

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

— Edith Eger

132. “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

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

— Edith Eger

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

— Edith Eger

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

— Edith Eger

136. “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

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

— Edith Eger

138. “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

139. “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

140. “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

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

— Edith Eger

142. “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

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

— Edith Eger

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

— Edith Eger

145. “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

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

— Edith Eger

147. “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

148. “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

149. “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

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

— Edith Eger