Vernon Howard
41 quotes
Biography
"You have succeeded in life when all you really want is only what you really need."
"Consciously risk the loss of something before losing it, and you will lose the fear of losing it."
"Take disturbance as an awakening sign that you misunderstand something you assumed you understood."
"To win real rewards, we must firmly decline the deceptive rewards offered by society."
"We need not hide anything from Truth, for it never condemns us, but only wishes to help."
"You are not responsible for anyone who stubbornly chooses to ruin his own life."
"Turning to God, Truth, Reality, simply means to let go, even fearfully at first, of our self-centered ideas."
"Truth does not hurt, rather, it is our resistance to its message that causes pain."
"If you hand a man a lemon and tell him that its sourness lies outside the lemon, he will think you are joking. Yet, with a perfectly straight face, that same man will tell you that his sour life is caused by external events. When will man learn that he is the cause of his own feelings for either happiness or anxiety?"
"The power of fantasy is so strong that people think they are having a good time when they are merely wasting money."
"When we associate with others we really associate with ourselves. We like or dislike in others whatever we like or dislike in ourselves."
"Mental sickness has set up a system by which it never loses. No matter what you do and no matter what the results are, you will win an ego-victory. That means that when you send your desires out into the world: 1. You will get what you want, or 2. You won't get what you want. Of you get what you want, the pseudo-nature says, "I have at last been given what I so richly deserve," and the sickness feels affirmed. If you don't get what you want, you feel sorry for yourself. You still feel affirmed because you get a feeling, and that's all that neurosis wants is a feeling."
"Worried thought prevents practical thought which could prevent worried thought."
"Mental silence is the perfect response to a challenge."
"Self-righteousness loves to pounce on an evil which by sheer accident is not its particular evil."
"The delusion of having wisdom creates the dangerous delusion of having power, leading to disaster."
"A person obsessed with the need to be happy will never be so. The obsession is the obstruction. He does not really seek happiness, rather he seeks for a condition which matches his personal idea regarding the nature of happiness. But happiness is not a mere idea, for one idea will always have competition from another idea. The is why the unhappy man chases for ever from one attraction to another. Happiness will come when he stops chasing, that is, when he stops thinking that an idea about happiness is the same as happiness. A man enjoying the sunshine does so without analysing it."
"Ask spiritual questions with intense integrity, and inspiring answers will surely arrive."
"The need to impress others causes half the world's woes. Don't add to them. Be real, not impressive."
"It is not a disaster to discover that you are not the person you assumed you were. To the contrary, it is the beginning of the end of disaster. Experiment: How you feel if you were neither a success or failure in life? How would you feel if you were neither popular nor unwanted?"
"You are not your cluster of memorized ideas about yourself. Awareness of this dissolves both the cluster and the belief that others can control you. If you have a self-image of being a desirable person, others can control you by flattering it, but can they control if you have no such image?"
"Astonishingly, if you will have absolutely nothing to do with suffering, suffering will have nothing to do with you."
"Remember that an answer to a difficulty resides at a higher level than our usual thinking, so seek this loftier level."
"The only activities of true value are those which aim at inner transformation."
"Human opinions are formed by accident and hardened by repetition. We cling to acquired opinions only because they give the illusion of being wise opinions. This creates division and hostility between people."