Hugh Prather
Life is also a mixture of unsolved problems, ambiguous victories and vague defeats-with very few moments of clear peace.Collection: Victory
The components of happiness are quite simple. Happiness is gentleness, peace, concentration, simplicity, forgiveness, humor, fearlessness, trust, and now. In its true form each quality includes all the rest, for happiness is whole, and one feels whole when genuinely happy.Collection: Simple
For communication to have meaning it must have a life. It must transcend "you and me" and become "us." If I truly communicate, I see in you a life that is not me and partake of it. And you see and partake of me. In a small way we then grow out of our old selves and become something new. To have this kind of sharing I cannot enter into a conversation clutching myself. I must enter into it with loose boundaries. I must give myself to the relationship, and be willing to be what grows out of it.Collection: Communication
I can not 'make my mark' for all time - those concepts are mutually exclusive. 'Lasting effect' is a self-contradictory term. Meaning does not exist in the future and neither do I. Nothing will have meaning 'ultimately.' Nothing will even mean tomorrow what it did today. Meaning changes with the context. My meaningfulness is here. It is enough that I am of value to someone today. It is enough that I make a difference now.Collection: Time
Being myself includes taking risks with myself, taking risks on new behavior, trying new ways of 'being myself', so that I can see who it is I want to be.Collection: Risk
Don't fight a fact, deal with it.Collection: Fighting
Moods should be heard but never danced to.Collection: Depression
Stands must be taken. If I am to respect myself I have to search myself for what I believe is right and take a stand on what I find. Otherwise, I have not gathered together what I have been given; I have not embraced what I have learned; I lack my own conviction.Collection: Believe
Support your friends - even in their mistakes. But be clear, however, that it is the friend and not the mistake you are supporting.Collection: Friendship
The first step of letting go: To remove what obstructs your experience of wholeness and peace, you must first look at the obstruction.Collection: Letting Go
Today I acknowledge that I am not in position to judge what mistakes anyone is making or what lessons anyone needs to learn. I don’t know how far someone has come or when that person will have a breakthrough, I simply don’t know what other people should be doing. But when I think I do know, I clearly am not doing what I should be doing, which is taking responsibility for my own life.Collection: Mistake
It's not that we fear the place of darkness, but that we don't think we are worth the effort to find the place of light.Collection: Fear
If the ocean was pure mind and I was a wave, I would be in terror if Itried to distinguish myself fromthe water that produced me.What is a wave without water, and what is a mind without God?Collection: Ocean
There were seventy-five people in the lobby and only a seven-year-old girl was finding out what it felt like to sit on the Marble FloorCollection: Girl
But it's morning. Within my hands is another day. Another day to listen and love and walk and glory. I am here for another day.Collection: Morning
If my attention is wandering, there is somewhere it wants to go, so obviously it does not want to be where I am holding it in the name of some self-styled obligation.Collection: Self
No matter what we talk about, we are talking about ourselvesCollection: Talking
Very seldom will a person give up on himself. He continues to have hope because he knows he has the potential for change. He tries again - not just to exist, but to bring about those changes in himself that will make life worth living. Yet people are very quick to give up on friends, and especially on their spouses, to declare them hopeless, and to either walk away or do nothing more than resign themselves to a bad situation.Collection: Change
If your reaction to your partner's fear-or any other form of distress- is disdain or irritation, you do not want oneness or even friendship with your partner at that moment.Collection: Letting Go
Peace, or freedom from conflict, is the absolute core of happiness. It is in learning to watch our sense of peace that we avoid unhappiness. All forms of misery are heralded by a frame of mind that must become immediately recognizable if we are ever to gain mastery in happiness...Take the time to look in your heart and be clear. Walk through life being clear. Practice doing each thing in peace.Collection: Happiness
Letting people in is largely a matter of not expending the energy to keep them out.Collection: People
We are all saying the same thing in different words.Collection: Creativity
The ego, as a collection of our past experiences, is continually offering miserable lines of thought. It's as if there were a stream with little fish swimming by, and when we hook one of them there is a judgment. The ego is constantly judging everybody and everything. It has its constant little chit chat about things that can happen in the future, things about the past, too, and these are the little fish that swim by. And what we learn to do-this is why it takes work-is to not reach out and grab a fish.Collection: Swimming
It's not that "today is the first day of the rest of my life," but that now is all there is of my life.Collection: Life
Just when I think I have learned the way to live, life changes and I am left the same. The more things change the more I am the same. I am what I started with, and when it is all over I will be all that is left of me.Collection: Life
When I have listened to my mistakes, I have grown.Collection: Mistake
Unless I accept my faults, I will most certainly doubt my virtues.Collection: Acceptance
All my life, I have made it complicated, but it is so simple. I love when I love. And when I love, I am myself.Collection: Simple
We feel understood by people who like us; misunderstood by people who don't -- and those feelings are probably realistic.Collection: People
Now that I know that I am no wiser than anyone else, does this wisdom make me wiser?Collection: Doe
Most words evolved as a description of the outside world, hence their inadequacy to describe what is going on inside me.Collection: World
One element of maturity is the realization that we don't get away with anything. Any advantage gained or convenience taken, any private procrastination or insincerity, no matter how subtle or quick in passing, is paid for.Collection: Taken
Next time I will ..." "From now on I will ..." - What makes me think I am wiser today than I will be tomorrow?Collection: Thinking
When we persist in looking for and finding what there is to value within our self, we discover a pure and loving being.Collection: Self
Within me is the potential to commit every evil act I see being committed by other men, and unless I feel this potential, I can at any moment be controlled by these same urges. I am free from these urges only if I recognize when I am feeling them, and while feeling them and acknowledging them to be me, choose not to follow them. Only in this way can I begin to regain the disowned parts of me. And only in this way can I know what it is I am criticizing in others.Collection: Men
Before, I thought I was actually fighting for my own self-worth; that is why I so desperately wanted people to like me. I thought their liking me was a comment on me, but it was a comment on them.Collection: Fighting
Every moment that I am centered in the future I suffer a temporary loss of this life.Collection: Loss
Why choose to be right instead of happy when there is no way to be right?Collection: Way
What an absurd amount of energy I have been wasting all my life trying to find out how things 'really are', when all the time they weren't.Collection: Trying
Whenever I find myself arguing for something with great passion, I can be certain I'm not convinced.Collection: Passion
Fears, indecision, and frustration feed on words. Without words they usually stop. . . . Words are at times good for looking back, but they are confining when I need to act in the present.Collection: Fear
Happiness is gentleness, peace, concentration, simplicity, forgiveness, humor, fearlessness, trust, and now.Collection: Simplicity
'Fault' means failure to meet a standard. Whose? Mine.Collection: Failure
I live now and only now, and I will do what I want to do this moment and not what I decided was best for me yesterday.Collection: Yesterday
There is no place love is not.Collection: Love
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. In this way boredom can act as an invitation to freedom by opening me to new options and thoughts. For example, if I can't change the activity, can I look at it more honestly?Collection: Boredom
There is nothing more painful than walking around with bitterness in your heart.Collection: Heart
When someone disagrees with me, I do not have to immediately start revising what I just said. People don't want me to always agree with them. They can sense this is phony. They can sense I am trying to control them: I am agreeing with them to make them like me. They feel; "I don't want to exist to like you. I DON'T exist to like you."Collection: People