Top 160 Edith Eger Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “It’s a dangerous game to play what-if with the past.”

— Edith Eger

102. “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

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

— Edith Eger

104. “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

105. “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

106. “Our childhoods end when we begin to live in someone else’s image of who we are.”

— Edith Eger

107. “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

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

— Edith Eger

109. “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

110. “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

111. “I erupt in a wail. I think my chest will break. The blast of sorrow is so severe that tears won’t come – only a jagged moaning in my throat.”

— 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. “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

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

— Edith Eger

115. “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

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

— Edith Eger

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

— Edith Eger

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

— Edith Eger

119. “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

120. “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

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.”

— Edith Eger

122. “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

123. “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

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

— Edith Eger

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

— Edith Eger

126. “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

127. “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

128. “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

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

— Edith Eger

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

— Edith Eger

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

— Edith Eger

132. “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

133. “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

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

— Edith Eger

135. “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

136. “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

137. “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

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

— Edith Eger

139. “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

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

— Edith Eger

141. “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

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

— Edith Eger

143. “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

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

— 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. “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

147. “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

148. “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

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

— Edith Eger

150. “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