Top 150 Lori Gottlieb Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

— Lori Gottlieb

2. “Ultracrepidarianism: the habit of giving opinions and advice on matters outside of one’s knowledge or competence.”

— Lori Gottlieb

3. “There’s no hierarchy of pain. Suffering shouldn’t be ranked, because pain is not a contest.”

— Lori Gottlieb

4. “We can’t have change without loss, which is why so often people say they want change but nonetheless stay exactly the same.”

— Lori Gottlieb

5. “Don’t judge your feelings; notice them. Use them as your map. Don’t be afraid of the truth.”

— Lori Gottlieb

6. “The four ultimate concerns are death, isolation, freedom, and meaninglessness.”

— Lori Gottlieb

7. “The only way to get to the other side of the tunnel is to go through it, not around it.”

— Lori Gottlieb

8. “Marriage isn’t a passion-fest; it’s more like a partnership formed to run a very small, mundane, and often boring nonprofit business. And I mean this in a good way.”

— Lori Gottlieb

9. “You won’t get today back.”

— Lori Gottlieb

10. “If the queen had balls, she’d be the king.”

— Lori Gottlieb

11. “We are mirrors reflecting mirrors reflecting mirrors, showing one another what we can’t yet see.”

— Lori Gottlieb

12. “Most big transformations come about from the hundreds of tiny, almost imperceptible, steps we take along the way.”

— Lori Gottlieb

13. “In idiot compassion, you avoid rocking the boat to spare people’s feelings, even though the boat needs rocking and your compassion ends up being more harmful than your honesty.”

— Lori Gottlieb

14. “Sometimes you have to take a leap of faith and experience something before its meaning becomes apparent.”

— Lori Gottlieb

15. “If the queen had balls, she’d be the king.” If you go through life picking and choosing, if you don’t recognize that “the perfect is the enemy of the good,” you may deprive yourself of joy.”

— Lori Gottlieb

16. “As the late psychotherapist Kohn Weakland famously said, “Before successful therapy, it’s the same damn thing over and over. After successful therapy, it’s one dame thing after another.”

— Lori Gottlieb

17. “As a therapist, I know a lot about pain, about the ways in which pain is tied to loss. But I also know something less commonly understood: that change and loss travel together. We can’t have change without loss, which is why so often people say they want change but nonetheless stay exactly the same.”

— Lori Gottlieb

18. “The nature of life is change, but the nature of people is to resist change.”

— Lori Gottlieb

19. “The opposite of depression isn’t happiness, but vitality.”

— Lori Gottlieb

20. “People often mistake numbness for nothingness, but numbness isn’t the absence of feelings; it’s a response to being overwhelmed by too many feelings.”

— Lori Gottlieb

21. “But part of getting to know yourself is to unknow yourself – to let go of the limiting stories you’ve told yourself about who you are so that you aren’t trapped by them, so you can live your life and not the story you’ve been telling yourself about your life.”

— Lori Gottlieb

22. “It’s impossible to get to know people deeply and not come to like them.”

— Lori Gottlieb

23. “Dating is about grand romantic gestures that mean little over the long term. Marriage is about small acts of kindness that bond you over a lifetime.”

— Lori Gottlieb

24. “Could it be that by protecting our kids from unhappiness as children, we’re depriving them of happiness as adults?”

— Lori Gottlieb

25. “Just because she sends you guilt doesn’t mean you have to accept delivery.”

— Lori Gottlieb

26. “Sharing difficult truths might come with a cost – the need to face them – but there’s also a reward: freedom. The truth releases us from shame.”

— Lori Gottlieb

27. “Sometimes in their pain, people believe that the agony will last forever. But feelings are actually more like weather systems – they blow in and they blow out. Just because you feel sad this minute or this hour or this day doesn’t mean you’ll feel that way in ten minutes or this afternoon or next week. Everything you feel – anxiety, elation, anguish – blows in and out again.”

— Lori Gottlieb

28. “The only way out is through.” The only way to get to the other side of the tunnel is to go through it, not around it. But I can’t even picture the entrance right now.”

— Lori Gottlieb

29. “Sometimes we are the cause of our difficulties. And if we can step out of our own way, something astonishing happens.”

— Lori Gottlieb

30. “You can have compassion without forgiving. There are many ways to move on, and pretending to feel a certain way isn’t one of them.”

— Lori Gottlieb

31. “How long do you think the sentence for this crime should be? A year? Five? Ten?′ Many of us torture ourselves over our mistakes for decades, even after we’ve genuinely attempted to make amends. How reasonable is that sentence?”

— Lori Gottlieb

32. “It’s not about lowering your standards – it’s about maturing and having reasonable expectations.”

— Lori Gottlieb

33. “The nature of life is change and the nature of people is to resist change.” It was a paraphrase of something he’d read that had resonated with him both personally and as a therapist, he told me, because it was a theme that informed nearly every person’s struggles.”

— Lori Gottlieb

34. “Honesty is stronger medicine than sympathy, which may console but often conceals. – Gretel Ehrlich.”

— Lori Gottlieb

35. “Every laugh and good time that comes my way feels ten times better than before I knew such sadness.”

— Lori Gottlieb

36. “We marry our unfinished business.”

— Lori Gottlieb

37. “Follow your envy – it shows you what you want.”

— Lori Gottlieb

38. “Forgiveness is a tricky thing, in the way that apologies can be. Are you apologizing because it makes you feel better or because it will make the other person feel better?”

— Lori Gottlieb

39. “Until you tell me what’s really on your mind, you’ll stay stuck exactly where you are.”

— Lori Gottlieb

40. “Right now it’s all about one foot, then the other. That’s one thing I tell patients who are in the midst of crippling depression, the kind that makes them think, There’s the bathroom. It’s about five feet away. I see it, but I can’t get there. One foot, then the other.”

— Lori Gottlieb

41. “But many people come to therapy seeking closure. Help me not to feel. What they eventually discover is that you can’t mute one emotion without muting the others. You want to mute the pain? You’ll also mute the joy.”

— Lori Gottlieb

42. “In the best goodbyes, there’s always the feeling that there’s something more to say.”

— Lori Gottlieb

43. “Avoidance is a simple way of coping by not having to cope.”

— Lori Gottlieb

44. “Uncertainty, I’m starting to realize, doesn’t mean the loss of hope – it means there’s possibility. I don’t know what will happen next – how potentially exciting!”

— Lori Gottlieb

45. “Its opposite is wise compassion, which means caring about the person but also giving him or her a loving truth bomb when needed.”

— Lori Gottlieb

46. “But feelings are actually more like weather systems – they blow in and they blow out. Just because you feel sad this minute or this hour or this day doesn’t mean you’ll feel that way in ten minutes or this afternoon or next week.”

— Lori Gottlieb

47. “Well you seem like you’re enjoying the experience of suffering, so I thought I’d help you out with that... There’s a difference between pain and suffering,′ Wendell says, ‘You’re going to have to feel pain- everyone feels pain at times- but you don’t have to suffer so much. You’re not choosing the pain, but you’re choosing the suffering.”

— Lori Gottlieb

48. “Before successful therapy, it’s the same damn thing over and over. After successful therapy, it’s one damn thing after another.”

— Lori Gottlieb

49. “What makes night within us may leave stars. – Victor Hugo.”

— Lori Gottlieb

50. “What people don’t like to think about is that you can do everything right – in life or in a treatment protocol – and still get the short end of the stick.”

— Lori Gottlieb