If I hold back any part of me, I suppress that much energy and potential. The question I want to ask myself now is not what behavior is good or bad, but in what ways would I express myself with greater energy if I didn't hold back.
— Hugh Prather
Sometimes I doubt, and sometimes I believe. I like not making myself believe when I am doubting and not making myself doubt when I am believing.
Ultimately, my character is defined by the quality of my sensitivity to other people. I exist in equilibrium. I am here to the degree I am there.
How genuine is my capacity for love if there is no one for me to love, to laugh with, to treat tenderly, to be trusted by?
Boredom or discontent is useful to me when I acknowledge it and see clearly my assumption that there's something else I would rather be doing.
The way for me to live is to have no way. My only habit should be to have none. Because I did it this way before is not sufficient reason to do it this way today.
I don't want to work to make money. I want to work to work.
To live for results would be to sentence myself to continuous frustration. My only sure reward is in my actions and not from them.
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.
No matter what we talk about, we are talking about ourselves.
We are the only authority on what is good for us. Once we see this, we feel an enormous peace and freedom.
Love does not exclude; it embraces. If we don't love someone outside ourselves, then very simply, we do not love ourselves.
Now I know that this energy within me is seeking more than the mate or the profession or the religion - more even than pleasure or power or meaning. It is seeking more of me; or better, it is, thank God, releasing more of me.
My only sure reward is in my actions, not from them.
Tomorrow is shallow, but today is as deep as truth.
Maturity is wanting nothing but what we see with the purity of our heart.
Whenever we condemn, we cloak the world in pain.
Just when I think I have learned the way to live, life changes.
We are always influenced because we do not live in a vacuum together with our intentions. We are in a relationship with everything that occurs.
It is only in helping someone else to awake that I awake.
There are people whose feelings and well-being are within our influence. We can never escape this fact.
Discouragement, if pursued, is the exercise of an option: to turn from creative to noncreative mental activity, to turn from what is present to what is over, to turn from that which builds to that which destroys.
I must act now without knowing the results. Thus, I give my actions their only possible meaning for me.
I will be what I will be - and I am now what I am. Here is where I will devote my energy.
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.
If the desire to write is not accompanied by actual writing, then the desire must be not to write.
