Top 30 Susan David Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Discomfort is the price of admission to a meaningful life.”

— Susan David

2. “Courage is not the absence of fear but fear walking.”

— Susan David

3. “Of course, determing what you truly care about is only half the process of walking your why. Once you’ve identified your values, you then have to take them out for a spin. This requires a certain amount of courage, but you can’t aim to be fearless. Instead, you should aim to walk directly into your fears, with your values as your guide, toward what matters to you. Courage is not an absence of fear; courage is fear walking.”

— Susan David

4. “These micro-moments of intimacy or neglect create a culture in which the relationship either thrives or withers. The tiny behaviours feed back on themselves and compound with time, as every interaction builds on the previous interaction, no matter how seemingly trivial. Each person’s moments of pettiness and anger, or generosity and lovingness, create a feedback loop that makes the overall relationship either more toxic or happier.”

— Susan David

5. “Life’s beauty is inseparable from its fragility.”

— Susan David

6. “People frequently die in fires or crash landings because they try to escape through the same door they used when they entered.”

— Susan David

7. “Emotional agility is about loosening up, calming down, and living with more intention. It’s about choosing how you’ll respond to your emotional warning system.”

— Susan David

8. “The most effective way to transform your life, therefore, is not by quitting your job and moving to an ashram, but, to paraphrase Teddy Roosevelt, by doing what you can, with what you have, where you are.”

— Susan David

9. “Choices,′ the philosopher Ruth Chang said, ’are chances for us to celebrate what is special about the human condition... that we have the power to create reasons for ourselves to become the distinctive people we are.”

— Susan David

10. “Emotions are data, they are not directives.”

— Susan David

11. “4. The obstacle course: Offset a positive vision with thoughts of potential challenges.”

— Susan David

12. “Nature favors evolution, not revolution. Studies from many different fields have demonstrated that small shifts over time can dramatically enhance our ability to thrive.”

— Susan David

13. “The ultimate goal of emotional agility is to keep a sense of challenge and growth alive and well throughout your life.”

— Susan David

14. “Acceptance is a prerequisite for change.”

— Susan David

15. “3. The precommitment: Anticipate obstacles and prepare for them with “if-then” strategies.”

— Susan David

16. “We still don’t like the things we don’t like –we just cease to be at war with them. And once the war is over, change can begin.”

— Susan David

17. “In looking for the right places to make these tiny changes, there are three broad areas of opportunity. You can tweak your beliefs – or what psychologists call your mindset; you can tweak your motivations; and you can tweak your habits. When we learn how to make small changes in each of these areas, we set ourselves up to make profound, lasting change over the course of our lives.”

— Susan David

18. “Compassion gives us the freedom to redefine ourselves as well as the all-important freedom to fail, which contains within it the freedom to take the risks that allow us to be truly creative.”

— Susan David

19. “1. The no-brainer: Switch up your environment so that when you’re hungry, tired, stressed, or rushed, the choice most aligned with your values is also the easiest.”

— Susan David

20. “2. The piggyback: Add a new behavior onto an existing habit.”

— Susan David

21. “When we show up fully, with awareness and acceptance, even the worst demons usually back down. Simply.”

— Susan David

22. “Emotions pass. They are transient. There is nothing in mental experience that demands an action.”

— Susan David

23. “The curse of comfort – defaulting to the familiar and accessible – wouldn’t matter so much if the only place it led you was down the supermarket aisle, past the unfamiliar and difficult-to-pronounce exotic foods, and straight to your favorite brand of peanut butter. Its impact, though, is much more insidious and far-reaching. It can lead to mistakes that waste our time and keep us from getting where we want to go – sometimes literally.”

— Susan David

24. “When we lack compassion, we see the world as just as unforgiving as we are, so the very idea of failure is crippling.”

— Susan David

25. “A child’s sense of secure attachment – this idea that I, in all my glory, as well as all my stinkiness and imperfection, am loved and accepted – allows him not only to take risks in the world but also to take risks with his own emotions. Knowing he will not be invalidated, rejected, punished, or shamed for feeling whatever he feels, he can test out sadness, happiness, or anger and figure out how to manage or respond to each of these emotions in turn.”

— Susan David

26. “People frequently die in fires or crash landings because they try to escape through the same door they used when they entered. In their panic, they rely on an established pattern instead of thinking of another way out. In the same manner, our suffering, our disengagement, our relationship challenges, and our other life difficulties are almost never solved by thinking in the same old, automatic way.”

— Susan David

27. “Perhaps the best term to describe living at the edge of our ability, thriving and flourishing, being challenged but not overwhelmed, is simply “whelmed.” And a key part of being whelmed lies in being selective in our commitments, which means taking on the challenges that really speak to you and that emerge from an awareness of your deepest values.”

— Susan David

28. “Staying emotionally agile requires us to find the equilibrium between overcompetence on the one hand and overchallenge on the other. This is the teeter-totter principle.”

— Susan David

29. “Who’s in charge – the thinker or the thought?” Are we managing our own lives according to our own values and what is important to us, or are we simply being carried along by the tide?”

— Susan David

30. “Our hidden demons are simply the residue of perfectly ordinary and almost universal insecurity, self-doubt, and fear of failure. Maybe you still resent your sister for flirting with your boyfriends in high school. Maybe you feel undervalued by your new boss. This is not even the stuff of a good, tear-soaked Oprah episode. But it can be enough to hook you into behaving in ways that don’t serve you.”

— Susan David

31. “When we have a reduced sense of our own agency and effectiveness, it weakens the “readiness potential” in our brains.”

— Susan David

32. “One way to start doing this is to answer a single question, in writing, each night before bed: “As I look back on today, what did I do that was actually worth my time?”

— Susan David

33. “The parent who praises a child’s accomplishment by saying, ‘You studied hard!’ promotes a growth mindset. The parent who says, ‘Look at your A, son! You’re a genius!’ promotes a fixed mindset.”

— Susan David

34. “Luckily, scientists have uncovered a few secrets to help make the process of creating habits easier. In their bestselling book Nudge, the economist Richard Thaler and the law professor Cass Sunstein show how to influence other people’s behavior through carefully designed choices, or what they called “choice architecture.” You.”

— Susan David