Quotes from Richard Carlson

Choose to be kind over being right and you'll be right everytime.

Effective listening is more than simply avoiding the bad habit of interrupting others while they are speaking or finishing their sentences. It's being content to listen to the entire thought of someone rather than waiting impatiently for your chance to respond.

You are what you practice most.

when you let go of your expectations, when you accept life as it is, you're free.To hold on is to be serious and uptight. To let go is to lighten up.

If, however, you take a moment to observe how you actually feel immediately after you criticise someone, you'll notice that you will feel a little deflated and ashamed, almost like you're the one who has been attacked. The reason this is true is that when we criticise, it's a statement to the world and to ourselves, "I have a need to be critical." This isn't something we are usually proud to admit.

True happiness comes not when we get rid of all of our problems,but when we change our relationship to them, when we see our problems as a potential source of awakening, opportunities to practice, and to learn.

Choose being kind over being right and you'll be right every time.

Life is a process--just one thing after another. When you lose it, just start again.

One of the most dynamic and significant changes you can make in your life is to make the commitment to drop all negative references to your past, to begin living now.

Reading is a gift. It's something you can do almost anytime and anywhere. It can be a tremendous way to learn, relax, and even escape. So, enough about the virtues of reading. Time to read on.

Even though we often mess up, most of us are doing the best that we know how with the circumstances that surround us.

Learning to stop sweating the small stuff involves deciding what things to engage in and what things to ignore. From a certain perspective, life can be described as a series of mistakes, one right after another with a little space in between.

A low mood is not the time to analyze your life. To do so is emotional suicide. If you have a legitimate problem, it will still be there when your state of mind improves. The trick is to be grateful for our good moods and graceful in our low moods—not taking them too seriously. The next time you feel low, for whatever reason, remind yourself, "This too shall pass." It will.

The old adage, 'If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is' isn't always correct. In fact, the suspicion, cynicism, and doubt that are inherent in this belief can and does keep people from taking advantage of excellent opportunities.

We deny the parts of ourselves that we deem unacceptable rather than accepting the fact that we're all less than perfect.

I'm merely talking about learning to be less bothered by the actions of people.

Your heart, the compassionate part of you, knows that it's impossible to feel better at the expense of someone else.

Try to maintain the perspective that, in time, everything disintegrates and returns to its initial form.

Almost universally, when people look back on their lives while on their deathbed [...] they wish they had spent more time with the people and activities they truly loved and less time worrying about aspects of life that, upon deeper examination, really don't matter at all that much. Imagining yourself at your own funeral allows you to look back at your life while you still have the chance to make some important changes.

Life is a process--just one thing after another. When you lose it, just start again.

as you begin to eliminate your need for perfection in all areas of your life, you'll begin to discover the perfection in life itself

Don't sweat the small stuff...and it's all small stuff.

Life isn't all it's cracked up to be. Nothing is ever good enough the way it is.

It seems that we have it backward in our society. We tend to look up to people who are under a great deal of stress, who can handle loads of stress, and those who are under a great deal of pressure.