Top 90 Hugh Prather Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “There is a time to let things happen and a time to make things happen.”

— Hugh Prather

2. “Just when I think I have learned the way to live, life changes.”

— Hugh Prather

3. “Support your friends – even in their mistakes. But be clear, however, that it is the friend and not the mistake you are supporting.”

— Hugh Prather

4. “It’s not that “today is the first day of the rest of my life,” but that now is all there is of my life.”

— Hugh Prather

5. “Happiness is a present attitude and not a future condition.”

— Hugh Prather

6. “Love, the magician, knows this little trick whereby two people walk in different directions yet always remain side by side...”

— Hugh Prather

7. “A messy mortal is my friend. Come walk with me in the mud.”

— Hugh Prather

8. “It’s this simple: If I never try anything, I never learn anything. If I never take a risk, I stay where I am.”

— Hugh Prather

9. “We are all saying the same thing in different words.”

— Hugh Prather

10. “All my life, I have made it complicated, but it is so simple. I love when I love. And when I love, I am myself.”

— Hugh Prather

11. “Letting go is freedom. When you find yourself in a useless battle, you merely walk off the battlefield.”

— Hugh Prather

12. “Don’t strive for love, be it.”

— Hugh Prather

13. “When I have listened to my mistakes, I have grown.”

— Hugh Prather

14. “Don’t fight a fact, deal with it.”

— Hugh Prather

15. “Stands must be taken. If I am to respect myself I have to search myself for what I believe is right and take a stand on what I find. Otherwise, I have not gathered together what I have been given; I have not embraced what I have learned; I lack my own conviction.”

— Hugh Prather

16. “A whole mind cannot create chaos. A conflicted mind can create nothing else.”

— Hugh Prather

17. “Perfectionism is slow death.”

— Hugh Prather

18. “But it’s morning. Within my hands is another day. Another day to listen and love and walk and glory. I am here for another day.”

— Hugh Prather

19. “Live as if everything you do will eventually be known.”

— Hugh Prather

20. “There are only three things you need to let go of judging, controlling, and being right. Release these three and you will have the whole mind and twinkly heart of a child.”

— Hugh Prather

21. “No matter what we talk about, we are talking about ourselves.”

— Hugh Prather

22. “Unless I accept my faults, I will most certainly doubt my virtues.”

— Hugh Prather

23. “An argument is always about what has been made more important than the relationship.”

— Hugh Prather

24. “If your reaction to your partner’s fear-or any other form of distress- is disdain or irritation, you do not want oneness or even friendship with your partner at that moment.”

— Hugh Prather

25. “Selfishness is neither good nor bad – it depends on the way we are selfish as to whether it nourishes or injures.”

— Hugh Prather

26. “There is nothing more painful than walking around with bitterness in your heart.”

— Hugh Prather

27. “One element of maturity is the realization that we don’t get away with anything. Any advantage gained or convenience taken, any private procrastination or insincerity, no matter how subtle or quick in passing, is paid for.”

— Hugh Prather

28. “True humor is fun – it does not put down, kid, or mock. It makes people feel wonderful, not separate, different, and cut off. True humor has beneath it the understanding that we are all in this together.”

— Hugh Prather

29. “The fatal mistake is waiting for life’s circumstances to be right before we begin. Simply begin with your heart, look deeply into it and trust what you feel. Practice knowing and you will know.”

— Hugh Prather

30. “Now that I know that I am no wiser than anyone else, does this wisdom make me wiser?”

— Hugh Prather

31. “Negative feedback is better that none. I would rather have a man hate me than overlook me. As long as he hates me I make a difference.”

— Hugh Prather

32. “Why choose to be right instead of happy when there is no way to be right?”

— Hugh Prather

33. “Before, I thought I was actually fighting for my own self-worth; that is why I so desperately wanted people to like me. I thought their liking me was a comment on me, but it was a comment on them.”

— Hugh Prather

34. “Most words evolved as a description of the outside world, hence their inadequacy to describe what is going on inside me.”

— Hugh Prather

35. “If my attention is wandering, there is somewhere it wants to go, so obviously it does not want to be where I am holding it in the name of some self-styled obligation.”

— Hugh Prather

36. “If the desire to write is not accompanied by actual writing, then the desire must be not to write.”

— Hugh Prather

37. “There is a part of me that wants to write, a part that wants to theorize, a part that wants to sculpt, a part that wants to teach... To force myself into a single role, to decide to be just on thing in life, would kill off large parts of me.”

— Hugh Prather

38. “Moods should be heard but never danced to.”

— Hugh Prather

39. “Books seek us out. They slip themselves into our hands just at the time we are ready for a new self-concept.”

— Hugh Prather

40. “Just when I think I have learned the way to live, life changes and I am left the same. The more things change the more I am the same. I am what I started with, and when it is all over I will be all that is left of me.”

— Hugh Prather

41. “Life is also a mixture of unsolved problems, ambiguous victories and vague defeats-with very few moments of clear peace.”

— Hugh Prather

42. “If a man takes off his sunglasses I can hear him better.”

— Hugh Prather

43. “Almost any difficulty will move in the face of honesty. When I am honest I never feel stupid. And when I am honest I am automatically humble.”

— Hugh Prather

44. “Some people will like me and some won’t. So I might as well be myself, and then at least I’ll know that the people who like me, like me.”

— Hugh Prather

45. “Sometimes I doubt and sometimes I believe. And I like not making myself believe when I am doubting, and not making myself doubt when I am believing. Surely neither God nor Accident need my consistency.”

— Hugh Prather

46. “When I get to where I can enjoy just lying on the rug picking up lint balls, I will no longer be too ambitious.”

— Hugh Prather

47. “I live now and only now, and I will do what I want to do this moment and not what I decided was best for me yesterday.”

— Hugh Prather

48. “There were seventy-five people in the lobby and only a seven-year-old girl was finding out what it felt like to sit on the Marble Floor.”

— Hugh Prather

49. “The first step of letting go: To remove what obstructs your experience of wholeness and peace, you must first look at the obstruction.”

— Hugh Prather

50. “We feel understood by people who like us; misunderstood by people who don’t – and those feelings are probably realistic.”

— Hugh Prather