Your Erroneous Zones Quotes
"The essence of greatness is the ability to choose personal fulfillment in circumstances where others choose madness."
"With death so endless a proposition and life so breathtakingly brief, ask yourself, 'Should I avoid doing the things I really want to do?'"
"A truer barometer of intelligence is an effective, happy life lived each day and each present moment of every day."
"You can fear your death, ineffectually, or you can use it to help you learn to live effectively."
"If you don’t begin taking these steps, you can anticipate living your entire life the way others say you must."
"Feelings are not just emotions that happen to you. Feelings are reactions you choose to have."
"Self-worth cannot be verified by others. You are worthy because you say it is so."
"Needing approval is tantamount to saying, 'Your view of me is more important than my own opinion of myself.'"
"You can't live it until it arrives. The problem here, however, is that we live in a culture which deemphasizes the now."
"If you are growing, you are alive. If you are not growing then you might as well be dead."
"Self-love means accepting yourself as a worthy person because you choose to do so."
"Approval in itself is not unhealthy; in fact, adulation is deliciously pleasurable. Approval-seeking is an erroneous zone only when it becomes a need rather than a want."
"Consider the following dialogue when friends are coming over to your house for an afternoon of bridge."
"Psychological message: 'What others think of you is much more important than what you think of yourself, therefore, if you don’t please your friends you deserve to feel bad.'"
"Mark Twain, writing in Puddinhead Wilson’s Calendar, gives a cogent description of how to break a habitual pattern such as approval-seeking. 'Habit is habit, and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed downstairs a step at a time.'"
"To put it succinctly, you can never please everyone."
"Abraham Lincoln talked about this in a conversation at the White House reported by Francis B. Carpenter: 'I do the very best I know how—the very best I can; and I mean to keep doing so until the end.'"
"Placing RESPONSIBILITY for your feelings on others."
"If you really cared about anyone, or anything, then you show this concern by feeling guilty about the terrible things you’ve done."
"You are a tower of strength. You are not going to collapse or fall apart if you encounter something new."
"Emerson, in his Journal of April 11, 1834, observed."
"You can do whatever you want because you want to and for no other reason."
"Rigidity is the basis of all prejudice, which means to prejudge."
"There is no such thing as planned spontaneity. It is a contradiction in terms."
"Security: Internal and External Varieties."
"The folly of shoulds, musts and oughts."
"If the world were so organized that everything had to be fair, no living creature could survive for a day."
"The only thing we ever learn from is failure. Success only confirms our superstitions."
"The demand for justice is not the neurotic behavior. It only becomes an erroneous zone when you punish yourself with a negative emotion as you fail to see evidence of the justice that you so futilely demand."
"The world is simply not put together that way. Tornadoes, floods, tidal waves, draughts are all unfair."
"Jealousy is really a demand that someone love you in a certain way, and you saying 'It isn’t fair' when they don’t."
"The legal system promises justice. 'The people demand justice,' and some of them even work to make it happen. But it generally doesn’t."
"If you must comply with all the rules all the time, you are destined to a life of emotional servitude."
"All progress involves flying in the face of old rules that no longer apply."
"Just do something nice because you, rather than a special occasion, call for it."
"Eliminate invitations based on obligation and fairness."
"Be a doer, not a complainer about injustice."
"Revenge is just another way of being controlled by others."
"It’s not the injustice that counts, it’s what you do about it."
"It takes not one drop of sweat to put off doing anything."
"Procrastination is the closest there is to a universal erroneous zone."
"No amount of wishing and hoping ever got anything accomplished."
"Inertia as a strategy for living is waiting for things to get better, which never arrives."
"Your putting it off zone is a movement away from being strong in your now."
"In any relationship in which two people become one, the end result is two half people."
"Being psychologically independent involves not needing others."
"A mother is not a person to lean on, but a person to make leaning unnecessary."
"The only antidote to anger is to eliminate the internal sentence, 'If only you were more like me.'"
"People free from erroneous zones are likers of life, and they wallow in all of it."
"They are too busy being to notice what their neighbors are doing."