Byron Katie · 352 pages
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“As long as you think that the cause of your problem is “out there”—as long as you think that anyone or anything is responsible for your suffering—the situation is hopeless. It means that you are forever in the role of victim, that you’re suffering in paradise.”
― Byron Katie, quote from Loving What Is: Four Questions That Can Change Your Life
“A thought is harmless unless we believe it. It’s not our thoughts, but our attachment to our thoughts, that causes suffering. Attaching to a thought means believing that it’s true, without inquiring. A belief is a thought that we’ve been attaching to, often for years.”
― Byron Katie, quote from Loving What Is: Four Questions That Can Change Your Life
“I am a lover of what is, not because I'm a spiritual person, but because it hurts when I argue with reality.”
― Byron Katie, quote from Loving What Is: Four Questions That Can Change Your Life
“Our parents, our children, our spouses, and our friends will continue to press every button we have, until we realize what it is that we don't want to know about ourselves, yet. They will point us to our freedom every time.”
― Byron Katie, quote from Loving What Is: Four Questions That Can Change Your Life
“If you put your hand into a fire, does anyone have to tell you to move it? Do you have to decide? No: When your hand starts to burn, it moves. You don’t have to direct it; the hand moves itself. In the same way, once you understand, through inquiry, that an untrue thought causes suffering, you move away from it.”
― Byron Katie, quote from Loving What Is: Four Questions That Can Change Your Life
“Peace doesn't require two people; it requires only one. It has to be you. The problem begins and ends there.”
― Byron Katie, quote from Loving What Is: Four Questions That Can Change Your Life
“You are your only hope, because we're not changing until you do. Our job is to keep coming at you, as hard as we can, with everything that angers, upsets, or repulses you, until you understand. We love you that much, whether we're aware of it or not. The whole world is about you.”
― Byron Katie, quote from Loving What Is: Four Questions That Can Change Your Life
“You move totally away from reality when you believe that there is a legitimate reason to suffer".”
― Byron Katie, quote from Loving What Is: Four Questions That Can Change Your Life
“We don't attach to people or to things; we attach to uninvestigated concepts that we believe to tbe true in the moment.”
― Byron Katie, quote from Loving What Is: Four Questions That Can Change Your Life
“Whatever it takes for you to find your freedom, that's what you've lived.”
― Byron Katie, quote from Loving What Is: Four Questions That Can Change Your Life
“In my experience, we don't make thoughts appear, they just appear. One day, I noticed that their appearance just wasn't personal. Noticing that really makes it simpler to inquire.”
― Byron Katie, quote from Loving What Is: Four Questions That Can Change Your Life
“It is easy to be swept away by some overwhelming feeling, so it’s helpful to remember that any stressful feeling is like a compassionate alarm clock that says, “You’re caught in the dream.” Depression, pain, and fear are gifts that say, “Sweetheart, take a look at your thinking right now. You’re living in a story that isn’t true for you.”
― Byron Katie, quote from Loving What Is: Four Questions That Can Change Your Life
“Isn’t it marvelous to discover that you’re the one you’ve been waiting for? That you are your own freedom?”
― Byron Katie, quote from Loving What Is: Four Questions That Can Change Your Life
“I am a lover of what is, not because I’m a spiritual person, but because it hurts when I argue with reality. We can know that reality is good just as it is, because when we argue with it, we experience tension and frustration. We don’t feel natural or balanced. When we stop opposing reality, action becomes simple, fluid, kind, and fearless.”
― Byron Katie, quote from Loving What Is: Four Questions That Can Change Your Life
“We’re all looking for love, in our confusion, until we find our way back to the realization that love is what we already are.”
― Byron Katie, quote from Loving What Is: Four Questions That Can Change Your Life
“There’s only one thing harder than accepting this, and that is not accepting it.”
― Byron Katie, quote from Loving What Is: Four Questions That Can Change Your Life
“Thoughts are like the breeze or the leaves on the trees or the raindrops falling. They appear like that, and through inquiry we can make friends with them. Would you argue with a raindrop? Raindrops aren’t personal, and neither are thoughts. Once a painful concept is met with understanding, the next time it appears you may find it interesting. What used to be the nightmare is now just interesting. The next time it appears, you may find it funny. The next time, you may not even notice it. This is the power of loving what is.”
― Byron Katie, quote from Loving What Is: Four Questions That Can Change Your Life
“Dying is everything they were looking for in life.”
― Byron Katie, quote from Loving What Is: Four Questions That Can Change Your Life
“And when people die, it’s so wonderful that they never come back to tell you.”
― Byron Katie, quote from Loving What Is: Four Questions That Can Change Your Life
“Peace and joy naturally, inevitably, and irreversibly make their way into every corner of your mind, into every relationship and experience. The process is so subtle that you may not even have any conscious awareness of it. You may only know that you used to hurt and now you don’t.”
― Byron Katie, quote from Loving What Is: Four Questions That Can Change Your Life
“Everyone is a mirror image of yourself—your own thinking coming back at you.”
― Byron Katie, quote from Loving What Is: Four Questions That Can Change Your Life
“The Work is merely four questions; it’s not even a thing. It has no motive, no strings. It’s nothing without your answers. These four questions will join any program you’ve got and enhance it. Any religion you have—they’ll enhance it. If you have no religion, they will bring you joy. And they’ll burn up anything that isn’t true for you. They’ll burn through to the reality that has always been waiting.”
― Byron Katie, quote from Loving What Is: Four Questions That Can Change Your Life
“Katie: We live; we die. Always right on time, not one moment sooner or later than”
― Byron Katie, quote from Loving What Is: Four Questions That Can Change Your Life
“You move totally away from reality when you believe that there is a legitimate reason to suffer.”
― Byron Katie, quote from Loving What Is: Four Questions That Can Change Your Life
“That’s what inquiry is for, to break through stressful mythology. These”
― Byron Katie, quote from Loving What Is: Four Questions That Can Change Your Life
“My experience is that the teachers we need most are the people we’re living with now.”
― Byron Katie, quote from Loving What Is: Four Questions That Can Change Your Life
“In reality, the pain we feel about a past event is created in the present,”
― Byron Katie, quote from Loving What Is: Four Questions That Can Change Your Life
“I love not rushing the process. Mind doesn’t shift until it does, and when it does shift, it’s right on time, not one second too late or too soon. People are just like seeds waiting to sprout. We can’t be pushed ahead of our own understanding. To”
― Byron Katie, quote from Loving What Is: Four Questions That Can Change Your Life
“Self-realization is the sweetest thing. It shows us how we are fully responsible for ourselves, and that is where we find our freedom.”
― Byron Katie, quote from Loving What Is: Four Questions That Can Change Your Life
“And have you also noticed that it’s hopeless to dictate people’s awareness or behavior? So let’s turn it around. She loves you, but she may not know it yet, and that lack of awareness is very painful. I am very clear that the whole world loves me. I just don’t expect them to realize it yet. [The audience laughs.]”
― Byron Katie, quote from Loving What Is: Four Questions That Can Change Your Life
Byron Katie
Born place: in The United States
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“In his endless journeys of exploration, crawling on all fours around the Urals and the Amazon and the Australian archipelagos which the furniture of the house was to him, sometimes he no longer knew where he was. And he would be found under the sink in the kitchen, ecstatically observing a patrol of cockroaches as if they were wild colts on the prairie. He even recognized a ttar in a gob of spit.
But nothing had the power to make him rejoice as much as Nino's presence. It seemed that, in his opinion, Nino concentrated in himself the total festivity of the world, which everywhere else was to be found scattered and divided. For in Giuseppe's eyes, Nino represented by himself all the myriad colors, and the glow of fireworks, and every species of fantastic and lovable animal, and carnival shows. Mysteriously, he could sense Nino's arrival from the moment when he began the ascent of the stairs! And he would hurry immediately, as fast as he could with his method, toward the entrance, repeating ino ino, in an almost dramatic rejoicing of all his limbs. At times, even, when Nino came home late at night, he, sleeping, would stir slightly at the sound of the key, and with a trusting little smile he would murmur in a faint voice: Ino.”
― Elsa Morante, quote from History
“War thoughts again. I think back to the business cards from that health shop earlier on. I think about miniature wars that individuals fight all the time. They fight against cellulite, or negative emotions, or addictions, or stress. I think about how we can now hire all different sorts of mercenaries to help us fight against ourselves…Therapists, manicurists, hairdressers, personal trainers, life coaches. But what’s it all for? What do all these little wars achieve? Although it is a part of my life too, and I want to be thin and pretty and not laughed at in the street and not so stressed and mad that I start screaming on the tube, it suddenly seems a little bit ridiculous. All the time we do these things we are trying to enlist ourselves into a bigger war. We are trying to join up, constantly, with the enemy.
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Hitler tried to impose his shiny, blonde, neat, sparkling world on us all and we resisted. So how is it that when McDonald’s and Disney and The Gap and L’Oreal and all the others try to do the same thing we all just say, ‘OK’? Hitler needed marketing, that’s all. His propaganda was, of course, brilliant for its time, everyone knows that. What a great idea, to make people feel that they belong to something, that their identity makes them special. If Hilter had bee able to enlist a twenty-first-century marketing department, would he have been able to sell Nazism to everyone? Why not? You can just see a beautiful, thin woman with her long blonde hair moving softly in the breezes, and the tagline ‘Because I’m worth it’.”
― Scarlett Thomas, quote from PopCo
“Even when they have been felled, let alone when they are still standing and fighting, they never disgrace themselves,”
― Tom Holland, quote from Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic
“Anyone who wants to hurt you has to come through me first.”
― Lisa Renee Jones, quote from Infinite Possibilities
“Its like Mrs Fitzherbert all over again, or that bloody Simpson woman! I do not believe it!"
"Sorry," said Merlin, wondering who the blazes Mrs Fitzherbert and that bloody Simpson woman
were. He had a feeling Gaius didn't mean Marge.”
― FayJay, quote from The Student Prince
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