Quotes from Loving What Is: Four Questions That Can Change Your Life

“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

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“The faculty of re-solution is possibly much invigorated by mathematical study, and especially by that highest branch of it which, unjustly, and merely on account of its retrograde operations, has been called, as if par excellence, analysis. Yet to calculate is not in itself to analyse. A chess-player, for example, does the one without effort at the other. It follows that the game of chess, in its effects upon mental character, is greatly misunderstood. I am not now writing a treatise, but simply prefacing a somewhat peculiar narrative by observations very much at random; I will, therefore, take occasion to assert that the higher powers of the reflective intellect are more decidedly and more usefully tasked by the unostentatious game of draughts than by a the elaborate frivolity of chess. In this latter, where the pieces have different and bizarre motions, with various and variable values, what is only complex is mistaken (a not unusual error) for what is profound. The attention is here called powerfully into play. If it flag for an instant, an oversight is committed resulting in injury or defeat. The possible moves being not only manifold but involute, the chances of such oversights are multiplied; and in nine cases out of ten it is the more concentrative rather than the more acute player who conquers. In draughts, on the contrary, where the moves are unique and have but little variation, the probabilities of inadvertence are diminished, and the mere attention being left comparatively unemployed, what advantages are obtained by either party are obtained by superior acumen. To be less abstract, let us suppose a game of draughts where the pieces are reduced to four kings, and where, of course, no oversight is to be expected. It is obvious that here the victory can be decided (the players being at all equal) only by some recherché movement, the result of some strong exertion of the intellect. Deprived of ordinary resources, the analyst throws himself into the spirit of his opponent, identifies himself therewith, and not unfrequently sees thus, at a glance, the sole methods (sometime indeed absurdly simple ones) by which he may seduce into error or hurry into miscalculation.”
― Edgar Allan Poe, quote from The Murders in the Rue Morgue: The Dupin Tales

“There was a new king and his name was pestilence. And he had created a new law - thou shalt do anything to survive.”
― Karen Maitland, quote from Company of Liars

“Englishmen are not usually softened by appeals to the memory of their mothers.”
― Rudyard Kipling, quote from The Man Who Would Be King

“Emma and I had both died twice, and for me, that second one actually stuck. Now I was a "resurrected American," better known, in colloquial terms, as life-challenged. Or undead. Or the living dead. But I'm not a zombie. I'm just a little less alive than your average high school junior.”
― Rachel Vincent, quote from With All My Soul

“Listen. This will probably be the worst pain you have ever experienced in your life. Everything in your body will tell you to let go, but you have
to hold on. You have to hold on, Maddy, no matter what. No matter how badly it hurts. You can never, never let go. Can you do that for me?”
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