Top 180 Martha N. Beck Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “Creating ways to be happy is your life’s work, a challenge that won’t end until you die.”

— Martha N. Beck

152. “I am bewildering you a little. Just enough to help you forget what you came to believe, so that you can remember what you’ve always known.”

— Martha N. Beck

153. “People who don’t honor their losses don’t grieve. They may lose all joy in living, but they don’t actively mourn, and this means that they don’t heal.”

— Martha N. Beck

154. “Menders of all times and places have taught that silencing the thoughts in our heads and opening to the experience of the body and emotions is the basis of all healing. It’s the only means by which we can reclaim our true nature or feel the subtle cues telling us how to find our way through life.”

— Martha N. Beck

155. “To make an activity joyful, keep adding things until the activity as a whole becomes more appealing than repulsing.”

— Martha N. Beck

156. “This is the part of us that makes our brief, improbable little lives worth living: the ability to reach through our own isolation and find strength, and comfort, and warmth for and in each other. This is what human beings do. This is what we live for, the way horses live to run.”

— Martha N. Beck

157. “If you’re a bit spongy, vulnerable to the unsettling energy of others, count yourself lucky. You’ve been given an incentive to armor up, to consciously screen out the ubiquitous stresses that afflict humanity.”

— Martha N. Beck

158. “I don’t believe that there are no spiritual beings around us. I don’t know what to call them, I don’t know how they work. But I know they’re there.”

— Martha N. Beck

159. “The position that I take partly as a result of living in Asia is where you stop living according to your expectations and you become available to experience things as they are.”

— Martha N. Beck

160. “I fell in love with Africa and began helping people fix things there.”

— Martha N. Beck

161. “I want you to be supervised, all day every day, by people who forgive your errors and believe in your destiny.”

— Martha N. Beck

162. “Make stuff up. Anyone who ever did something new or interesting was making it up as they went along.”

— Martha N. Beck

163. “You can’t stay well without telling – and living – the truth.”

— Martha N. Beck

164. “Take off your watch: the divine is speaking to you.”

— Martha N. Beck

165. “It seems to me at this moment that laughing is a serious thing, that it connects us with truth and love and God.”

— Martha N. Beck

166. “Anyone who comes into your life, under any circumstances, has something to teach you.”

— Martha N. Beck

167. “Diana frowns. “You’re taking me home, right? You just said you would.” “Hoink hoink! Of course, piglet. But I meant your real home.” “Which, last I checked,” says Diana acidly, “is in Los Angeles, California, United States of America, solar system, planet Earth.” “Hmm,” says the boar, hiccupping dreamily. “That’s what you think, darling. Tell me, can you say you’ve felt really at home at that address? Haven’t you been homesick your whole life?”

— Martha N. Beck

168. “When you find yourself stressed, tense, and veering toward anxiety eating, take a time-out for just three breaths. Long, deep breaths.”

— Martha N. Beck

169. “This was how I discovered the most powerful way I know to kill our own cowardice as we approach a gate to hell. We must pull our minds away from situations that exist only in our hopes and fears, and rivet our attention – all of it – on the present moment.”

— Martha N. Beck

170. “I only put down on paper what works for me, and since I started out as a human train wreck, the ways I’ve learned to be happy also work for others.”

— Martha N. Beck

171. “The Indian sage Nisargadatta Maharaj once commented, “The only true statement the mind can make is ‘I do not know.”

— Martha N. Beck

172. “Believing things that aren’t true for us at the deepest level is the commonest way in which we lose our integrity. Then suffering arises – not as punishment, but as a signal that we’re being torn apart. The purpose of suffering is to help us locate our internal divisions, reclaim our reality, and heal these inner rifts.”

— Martha N. Beck

173. “To be in integrity is to be one thing, whole and undivided.”

— Martha N. Beck

174. “No matter how difficult and painful it may be, nothing sounds as good to the soul as the truth.”

— Martha N. Beck

175. “A lot of things you believe to be impossible are actually well within your reach.”

— Martha N. Beck

176. “At the deepest level, you know what makes you happy and how to create your best possible life. That knowledge is coded into your very nature. But your nature is forever colliding with a force that can tear it apart: culture.”

— Martha N. Beck

177. “Contemplating integrity as a way of life is like deciding to leave your homeland and become a citizen of a new country: it involves a major identity.”

— Martha N. Beck

178. “I’ve learned that the worst pain, fear, and torment I’ve ever experienced has only deepened my ability to experience joy. I feel this even when I’m hurting, because while pain and pleasure are mutually exclusive, pain and joy are not.”

— Martha N. Beck

179. “The extent to which people will defy nature to serve culture can be truly horrifying.”

— Martha N. Beck

180. “If you don’t walk your true path, you don’t find your true people. You end up in places you don’t like, learning skills that don’t fulfill you, adopting values and customs that feel wrong.”

— Martha N. Beck

181. “Criticism is an alluring substitute for creation, because tearing things down, unlike building them up, really is as easy as falling off a stump. It’s blissfully simple to strike a savvy, sophisticated pose by attacking someone else’s creations, but the old adage is right: Any fool can burn down a barn. Building one is something else again.”

— Martha N. Beck

182. “And if the whine and sting of purposelessness isn’t enough to shake us out of our sleepwalking, our subconscious minds will up the ante. They’ll summon the megafauna, the mental wild beasts we call mood states.”

— Martha N. Beck

183. “Because our true nature is serious about restoring us to wholeness, it hauls out the one tool that reliably gets our attention: suffering.”

— Martha N. Beck

184. “And, above all, please learn to trust your inner teacher, the burst of relaxation and freedom that rings through your whole body.”

— Martha N. Beck

185. “What upsets people is not what happens to them, but their thoughts about what happens.”

— Martha N. Beck

186. “This is their journey. I’ll have my time to go through xyz, but now is not my time. Everyone gets their time.”

— Martha N. Beck

187. “My story is a love story, but only those who are tortured by love can understand what I mean.”

— Martha N. Beck