Top 172 Quotes & Sayings by Vernon Howard - Page 2

Inner liberty can be judged by how often a person feels offended, for you can no more insult a mature man than you can paint the air.

Anger or bitterness toward those who have hurt you will block your path to higher ground. You can have anger toward people or you can have freedom from people, but you can't have both.

You have it made when you don't care whether you have it made or not.

Don't look for someone in whom to believe. Believe in yourself. The only authentic authority is your own original nature.

Happiness is not the acquisition of anything; it's the understanding of something.

The need to impress others causes half the world's woes.

Be teachable. That is the whole secret.

The leap is made by dropping vanity over knowledge and by a willingness to become nothing in order to become everything.

The outer storm ceases the moment the inner storm ends, for they are the same storm.

Truth does not really hurt, rather it is our resistance to its message that causes us pain.

Run forward when possible, walk ahead when you can, stagger onward when you must, but never cease your forward movement.

Inner guidance is heard like soft music in the night by those who have learned to listen.

No one can tell you what is right for you except yourself. So start telling yourself what to do. If you blunder for ten years while thinking for yourself, that is rich treasure when compared with living these ten years under the mental domination of another.

The problem is not what other people think, do or say; it is your reaction.

To change what you get you must change who you are.

Awareness of your weakness and confusion makes you strong because conscious awareness is the bright light that destroys the darkness of negativity. Detection of inner negativity is not a negative act, but a courageously positive act that makes you a new person.

The answers come when you are quietly willing to be without them.

When the mind is exhausted in trying to find the answer, the answer dawns.

Resistance to the disturbance is the disturbance.

You know what is right. Deep down, you know. The battle between your true wisdom and the counterfeit wisdom of society is what causes frustration. Refuse to compromise with what you know is right-with what is right for you.

All we have to do is to receive what we are given...We are given the naturalness to love someone, to be calm in crisis, to ignore self-defeating suggestions, to be pleasant, forgiving, tender, helpful, unworried, brave, energetic.

It is a thousand times more sensible to climb one foot up the mountainside than to chatter for years about the mountaintop.

When you are genuinely strong, you neither attack nor defend and so retain your energy.

Is the beam from a lighthouse affected by howling wind and rain? It remains perfectly steadfast and unaffected by the storm. Your true self is like that. Nothing can ever harm you once you are consciously aware that it is so.

You must dare to disassociate yourself from those who would delay your journey... Leave, depart, if not physically, then mentally. Go your own way, quietly, undramatically, and venture toward Trueness at last.

You can not escape a prison if you do not know you're in one.

Living in the now is freedom from all problems connected with time. You ought to remember that sentence, you ought to memorize it, and ought to take it out, you ought to practice it, you ought to apply it. And most of all, you ought to rejoice in it because you have just heard how not to be wretched, miserable you any more but to be a brand new, and forever brand new man or woman.

How would you feel if you had no fear? Feel like that. How would you behave toward other people if you realized their powerlessness to hurt you? Behave like that. How would your react to so-called misfortune if you saw its inability to bother you? React like that. How would you think toward yourself if you knew you were really all right? Think like that.

The only way to do something truly important every day is to seek to understand yourself every day.

The reason why most people are frustrated is because a lie cannot be turned into a truth.

It is a mistake for anyone to think he has lived too long in his old, unsatisfactory ways to make the great change. If you switch on the light in a dark room, it makes no difference how long it was dark because the light will still shine. Be teachable. That is the whole secret.

A person obsessed with the need to be happy will never be so. The obsession is the obstruction.

We can become slaves to things we don't understand

A chief cause of unhappiness is what I call mental movies. Mental movies are a misuse of the imagination. You know how it goes. You have a painful experience with someone, then run it over and over in your mind. You visualize what you said, what he did, how you both felt. As awful as it is, you feel compelled to repeat the film day and night. It is as if you were locked inside a theatre playing a horrible movie.

We can accept God becoming Man to save Man, but not Man becoming God to save himself.

The genuinely spiritual person is one who has lost all desire to be anyone but exactly who he is, without labels and without apologies. He is what he is and that's all there's is to it. Such a man is undivided, uncomplicated and contented.

A false path must be tensely and angrily defended by those it has deceived.

Instead of fighting your problems, picture your way out of them.

Healing fails to occur because it is much easier to injure another than to heal oneself.

An obvious fact about negative feelings is often overlooked. They are caused by us, not by exterior happenings. An outside event presents the challenge, but we react to it. So we must attend to the way we take things, not to the things themselves.

Our life-transformation is in exact proportion to the amount of truth we can take without running away.

Don't try to be spiritual. That is only a word in the dictionary. Make it your goal to become a normally functioning individual. Let these principles shape you according to your real nature of a simple, decent, honest, unafraid human being.

The miracle of self-healing occurs when the inner patient yields to the inner physician.

If heaven existed as a physical building on earth, human beings would remodel it to make it right.

When told that man lives in delusion everyone thinks of himself as the exception; hence his delusion.

Every day that you attempt to see things as they are in truth Is a supremely successful day.

Have the daring to stop doing the things you really don't want to do. Can you see them? Look closely. Can you observe the many things you do because you reluctantly feel you should or must? Watch closely. Examine every action and reaction. Do you act naturally or do you act because you feel compelled? If you feel compelled, stop. Compulsion is slavery. Example: Refuse to go along with the crowd.

Worried thought prevents practical thought which could prevent worried thought.

Many of us knock on the door but remain outside, because knocking and entering are entirely different actions. Knocking is necessary, consisting of reading books, attending meetings, asking questions. But entrance requires much bolder action. It requires one to enter into himself, to uncover hidden motives, to see contradictions, and to realize his actual power for self-change.

The world consists of imaginary people, claiming imaginary virtues and suffering from imaginary happiness.

Suppose you stand on a high place to enjoy the beauty of the sparkling sea below. You need do nothing to create that beauty; you need only BE IN THE SAME PLACE WHERE IT IS, and let nature do the rest. So it is with the inner life. There is nothing we can DO to gain psychic beauty. It already exists without our effort. We need only be where we belong, that is, in self-union. Then, beauty IS.

One of society's absurd delusions is that the spending of money can cure something.

Whenever encountering a troublesome person, do not identify him as being cruel or stupid or rude or anything else like that. Instead, see him as a frightened person.

Human sickness is so severe that few can bear to look at it...but those who do will become well.

Ignorant people remain ignorant because they have a secret agreement to call one another intelligent.

Be very careful that you do not unconsciously assume that nervous tension is power. This is vital. Watch yourself the next time you work toward some goal. Look very closely to discover tense feelings and nervous thoughts whirling around inside. Do not let them deceive you into assuming that they are creative forces; they are not. They are thieves of genuine powers. As always, your awareness of their thievery is your first fine step toward casting them out.

If you call one thing good, you must call its opposite bad. If you think it wonderful to make a big profit in your business, you will also think it terrible if you incur a large loss. The idea is to live above the opposites.

Procrastination is illogical from every viewpoint. It is like the man who wanted to cross the stream, so he sat on the bank to wait for all the water to run by.

Genuine kindness is not what we do, it is what we are.

A perfect method for awakening is to examine the results of our daily actions. If they are harmful, we know we need more consciousness.