Werner Erhard
32 quotes
Biography
"Man keeps looking for a truth that fits his reality. Given our reality, the truth doesn't fit."
"We can choose to be audacious enough to take responsibility for the entire human family. We can choose to make our love for the world what our lives are really about. Each of us has the opportunity, the privilege, to make a difference in creating a world that works for all of us. It will require courage, audacity and heart. It is much more radical than a revolution – it is the beginning of a transformation in the quality of life on our planet. What we create together is a relationship in which our work can show up as making a difference in people's lives. I welcome the unprecedented opportunity for us to work globally on that which concerns us all as human beings. If not you, who? If not now, when? If not here, where?"
"The possibility to create the context in which people’s lives really matter is undoubtedly the most profound opportunity available to anyone, ever."
"You and I want our lives to matter. We want our lives to make a real difference — to be of genuine consequence in the world. We know that there is no satisfaction in merely going through the motions in life, even if those motions make us successful or even if we have arranged to make those motions pleasant. We want to know we have had some impact on the world. In fact, you and I want to contribute to the quality of life. We want to make the world work."
"At all times and under all circumstances, we have the power to transform the quality of our lives."
"To take a stand for the future is to bring forth a new opportunity, not one derived from the past, but an opportunity created from a future to which we give ourselves."
"The moment when you really experience that you have created yourself being whatever way you are, at that same moment you will never have to be that way again."
"Love for a person is acceptance of him or her the way he is and the way he is not."
"Does it really work for us to go through our lives as though there were no realizations beyond the grasp of our system-of-concepts, the awareness of which would transform the quality of our lives?"
"Of all the disciplines that I studied, practiced, learned, Zen was the essential one. It was not so much an influence on me, rather it created space. It allowed those things that were there to be there. It gave some form to my experience. And it built up in me the critical mass from which was kindled the experience that produced est."
"You and I possess within ourselves, at every moment of our lives and under all circumstances, the power to transform the quality of our lives."
"Most of our notions about the world come from a set of assumptions which we take for granted, and which, for the most part, we don't examine or question. We bring these assumptions to the table with us as a given. They are so much a part of who we are that it is difficult for us to separate ourselves from them enough to be able to talk about them. We do not think these assumptions, we think from them."
"You are god in your own universe. There is no god unless it is self."
"Something experienced is true; the same thing believed is a lie."
"There are only two things in the world — nothing and semantics."
"How do I know I'm not the reincarnation of Jesus Christ?"
"Obviously, the truth is what's so. Not so obviously, it's also so what."
"What isn't, isn't. You can't put it together...what you have to do is experience it being together."
"You are part of every atom in the world, and every atom is part of you."
"I take responsibility for ending starvation within twenty years. The Hunger Project is not about solutions. It's not about fixing up the project. It's not about anybody's good idea. The Hunger Project is about creating a context - creating the end of hunger as an idea whose time has come. (Quote from 1977, re: The Hunger Project)"
"Belief in God is the single greatest barrier to God in the Universe. It is almost a total barrier to the experience of God. When you think you have experienced God, you haven't. Experiencing God is experiencing God, and that is true religion."
"Werner Erhard is at once a thoughtful student of, and contributor to, the continuing philosophical dialogue that has cradled the world civilization in which we all dwell today. Unlike many philosophers and students of philosophy, he not only originates and develops ideas, but also profoundly touches people with them- thereby transforming people’s experience of what is possible for human beings and their ability to act on that possibility."
"Without Carl Rogers and Werner Erhard coaching would not exist."
"“I credit Werner Erhard as one of the founders of contemporary coaching. Werner Erhard introduced the idea of transformation in the early 1970s through his est courses which opened people’s minds to the possibility of their growth and potential.""
"Werner Erhard is virtually the only consciousness leader, and the only person of distinction in American society to have stepped outside this childish quarrel between Scientology and society and to have acknowledged both his indebtedness to Hubbard and his emphatic differences with him."