Top 90 Hugh Prather Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Letting people in is largely a matter of not expending the energy to keep them out.”

— Hugh Prather

52. “Being myself includes taking risks with myself, taking risks on new behavior, trying new ways of ‘being myself’, so that I can see who it is I want to be.”

— Hugh Prather

53. “We become what we look at most.”

— Hugh Prather

54. “To sing with the voice of angels as we do the work of angels. To laugh with the laugh of Buddha as we go to our awakening. To extend the arms of Jesus to welcome the presence of children and let them climb into our hearts.”

— Hugh Prather

55. “To avail yourself of His certain wisdom, ask of Him whatever questions you have. But do not entreat Him, for that will never be necessary.”

— Hugh Prather

56. “The tools of the mind can be wrongly used, but the mind possesses no wrong tools.”

— Hugh Prather

57. “Problems assault us to the degree they preoccupy us. The key to release, rest, and inner freedom is not the elimination of all external difficulties. It is letting go of our pattern of reactions to those difficulties.”

— Hugh Prather

58. “To live for results would be to sentence myself to continuous frustration. My only sure reward is in my actions and not from them.”

— Hugh Prather

59. “If I work toward an end, meantime I am confined to a process.”

— Hugh Prather

60. “Every moment that I am centered in the future I suffer a temporary loss of this life.”

— Hugh Prather

61. “Because the results are unpredictable, no effort of mine is doomed to failure.”

— Hugh Prather

62. “When we recognize that nothing has to go right for us to be happy, that people do not have to behave for us to love them, our walk home can be surprisingly simple. We have enormous power not to manipulate the world, but to be happy and to know peace.”

— Hugh Prather

63. “I talk because I feel, and I talk to you because I want you to know how I feel.”

— Hugh Prather

64. “Love itself is not an act of will, but sometimes I need the force of my volition to break with my habitual responses and pass along the love already here.”

— Hugh Prather

65. “Happiness is gentleness, peace, concentration, simplicity, forgiveness, humor, fearlessness, trust, and now.”

— Hugh Prather

66. “It seems that the truth is needed today is always a lie by tomorrow.”

— Hugh Prather

67. “It’s not that we fear the place of darkness, but that we don’t think we are worth the effort to find the place of light.”

— Hugh Prather

68. “Today I don’t want to live for, I want to live.”

— Hugh Prather

69. “By approaching my problems with “What might make things a little better?” rather than “What is the solution?” I avoid setting myself up for certain frustration. My experience has shown me that I am not going to solve anything in one stroke; at best I am only going to chip away at it.”

— Hugh Prather

70. “The components of happiness are quite simple. Happiness is gentleness, peace, concentration, simplicity, forgiveness, humor, fearlessness, trust, and now. In its true form each quality includes all the rest, for happiness is whole, and one feels whole when genuinely happy.”

— Hugh Prather

71. “My trouble is I analyze life instead of live it.”

— Hugh Prather

72. “I live from one tentative conclusion to the next, thinking each one is final. The only thing i know for sure is that I’am confused.”

— Hugh Prather

73. “Do I avoid looking a stranger in the eyes because I don’t want to make him uncomfortable, or do I turn my eyes so he can’t look into me?”

— Hugh Prather

74. “There is no place love is not.”

— Hugh Prather

75. “I like a man with faults, especially when he knows it. To err is human.”

— Hugh Prather

76. “What an absurd amount of energy I have been wasting all my life trying to find out how things ‘really are’, when all the time they weren’t.”

— Hugh Prather

77. “I don’t need a “reason” to be happy. I don’t have to consult the future to know how happy I feel now.”

— Hugh Prather

78. “Whenever I find myself arguing for something with great passion, I can be certain I’m not convinced.”

— Hugh Prather

79. “It is your right to be happy. This is what you were made for. And if you will not resist, happiness will find a way to pour from your heart and fill your days.”

— Hugh Prather

80. “I sometimes wonder if the “dead” are not more present, more comfort, more here than most of the living.”

— Hugh Prather

81. “It is enough that I am of value to somebody today.”

— Hugh Prather

82. “The number of things just outside the perimeter of my financial reach remains constant no matter how much my financial condition improves. With each increase in my income a new perimeter forms and I experience the same relative sense of lack.”

— Hugh Prather

83. “Whenever we condemn, we cloak the world in pain.”

— Hugh Prather

84. “My prayer is: I will be what I will be, I will do what I will do.”

— Hugh Prather

85. “I sometimes react to making a mistake as if I have betrayed myself. My fear of making a mistake seems to be based on the hidden assumption that I am potentially perfect and that if I can just be very careful I will not fall from heaven. But a ‘mistake’ is a declaration of the way I am, a jolt to the way I intend, a reminder I am not dealing with the facts. When I have listened to my mistakes I have grown.”

— Hugh Prather

86. “I can’t be found in myself; I discover myself in others. That much is clear. And I suspect that I also love and care for myself in others.”

— Hugh Prather

87. “If we knew everything that was ever said about us and if at the same time we took every word at face value, we would remain friends with no one.”

— Hugh Prather

88. “What I want are words that reflect my heart, not my cleverness.”

— Hugh Prather

89. “When we persist in looking for and finding what there is to value within our self, we discover a pure and loving being.”

— Hugh Prather

90. “Our job this day is to become part of the answer to the world’s immense and protracted suffering rather than continuing our ancient task of being part of the difficulty.”

— Hugh Prather

91. “Sometimes the only way for me to find out what it is I want to do is go ahead and do something. Then the moment I start to act, my feelings become clear.”

— Hugh Prather

92. “To err is human- I’m uncomfortable around gods.”

— Hugh Prather