Quotes from Hugh Prather

Just when I think I have learned the way to live, life changes.

My trouble is I analyze life instead of live it.

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.

Discouragement, if pursued, is the exercise of an option: to turn from creative to noncreative mental activity, to turn from what is present to what is over, to turn from that which builds to that which destroys.

Now I know that this energy within me is seeking more than the mate or the profession or the religion - more even than pleasure or power or meaning. It is seeking more of me; or better, it is, thank God, releasing more of me.

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.

There is a time to let things happen and a time to make things happen.

I must act now without knowing the results. Thus, I give my actions their only possible meaning for me.

It is only in helping someone else to awake that I awake.

Books seek us out. They slip themselves into our hands just at the time we are ready for a new self-concept.

The fatal mistake is waiting for life's circumstances to be right before we begin. Simply begin with your heart, look deeply into it and trust what you feel. Practice knowing and you will know.

Happiness is gentleness, peace, concentration, simplicity, forgiveness, humor, fearlessness, trust, and now.

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.

Love itself is not an act of will, but sometimes I need the force of my volition to break with my habitual responses and pass along the love already here.

It seems that the truth is needed today is always a lie by tomorrow.

Don't strive for love, be it.

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.

How genuine is my capacity for love if there is no one for me to love, to laugh with, to treat tenderly, to be trusted by?

Boredom is useful to me when I notice it and think: Oh I'm bored; there must be something else I want to be doing ... boredom acts as an initiator of originality by pushing me into new activities or new thoughts.

Today I don't want to live for, I want to live.

I like a man with faults, especially when he knows it. To err is human- I'm uncomfortable around gods.

Perfectionism is slow death.

It is enough that I am of value to somebody today.

Unless I accept my faults, I will most certainly doubt my virtues.