Quotes from Richard Carlson

Do I want to be 'right'—or do I want to be happy?

El ahora es lo único que tenemos, y el único tiempo sobre el que tenemos algún control.

You never need to be frightened by your own thoughts.

While eating dessert, we ponder what we should do afterward. After that evening, it's "What should we do this weekend?" After we've been out, we walk into the house and immediately turn on the television, pick up the phone, open a book, or start cleaning. It's almost as though we're frightened at the thought of not having something to do, even for a minute.

Life isn't an emergency.

I've never met anyone (myself included) who hasn't turned little things into great big emergencies. We take our own goals so seriously that we forget to have fun along the way, and we forget to cut ourselves some slack. We take simple preferences and turn them into conditions for our own happiness. Or, we beat ourselves up if we can't meet our self-created deadlines.

Any success that you do have is despite your fear, not because of it.

two rules of harmony. #1) Don't sweat the small stuff, and #2) It's all small stuff.

Circumstances don't make a person, they reveal him or her.

When you hurry someone along, interrupt someone, or finish his or her sentence, you have to keep track not only of your own thoughts but of those of the person you are interrupting

Patience adds a dimension of ease and acceptance to your life.

The trick is to be grateful for our good moods and graceful in our low moods—not taking them too seriously.

In low moods we lose our perspective and everything seems urgent. We completely forget that when we are in a good mood, everything seems so much better.

Regardless of who you are or what you do, however, remember that nothing is more important than your own sense of happiness and inner peace and that of your loved ones. If you're obsessed with getting everything done, you'll never have a sense of well-being!

It suggests that life is filled with opportunities to choose between making a big deal out of something or simply letting it go, realizing it doesn't really matter. If you choose your battles wisely, you'll be far more effective in winning those that are truly important.

Contrary to popular belief, negative feelings don't need to be studied and analyzed. When you analyze your negative feelings, you'll usually end up with more of them to contend with. The

When you take time, often, to reflect on the miracle of life—the miracle that you are even able to read this book—the gift of sight, of love, and all the rest, it can help to remind you that many of the things that you think of as "big stuff" are really just "small stuff" that you are turning into big stuff.

The key to a good life is this: If you're not going to talk about something during the last hour of your life, then don't make it a top priority during your lifetime.

The ill effects of thought come about when we forget that thought is a function of our consciousness.. an ability that we as human beings have. We are the producers of our own thinking.

Stress is nothing more than a socially acceptable form of mental illness.

When we criticize another person, it says nothing about that person; it merely says something about our own need to be critical.

Something wonderful begins to happen with the simple realization that life, like an automobile, is driven from the inside out, not the other way around. As you focus more on becoming more peaceful with where you are, rather than focusing on where you would rather be, you begin to find peace right now, in the present. Then, as you move around, try new things, and meet new people, you carry that sense of inner peace with you. It's absolutely true that, "Wherever you go, there you are.

One of the mistakes many of us make is that we feel sorry for ourselves, or for others, thinking that life should be fair, or that someday it will be. It's not and it won't. When we make this mistake we tend to spend a lot of time wallowing and/or complaining about what's wrong with life. "It's not fair," we complain, not realizing that, perhaps, it was never intended to be.

Stress is nothing more than a socially acceptable form of mental illness.