Byron Katie

Nothing outside you can ever give you what you're looking for.

When a thought appears such as "Do the dishes" and you don't do them, notice how an internal war breaks out... The stress and weariness you feel are really mental combat fatigue.

It's difficult to seek other people's love. It's deadly. In seeking it you lose what is genuine. This is the prison we create for ourselves as we seek what we already have.

If you put your hand into a fire, does anyone have to tell you to move it? Do you have to decide? No: When your hand starts to burn, it moves. You don’t have to direct it; the hand moves itself. In the same way, once you understand, through inquiry, that an untrue thought causes suffering, you move away from it.

If you don't like your world, question your thoughts about it.

The end of suffering happens in this very moment, whether you're watching a terrorist attack or doing the dishes. And compassion begins at home. Because I don't believe my thoughts, sadness can't exist. That's how I can go to the depths of anyone's suffering, if they invite me, and take them by the hand and walk them out of it into the sunlight of reality. I've taken that walk myself.

When you’re focused outside and believe that your problem is caused by someone else, rather than by your attachment to the story you’re believing in the moment, then you are your own victim, and the situation appears to be hopeless.

Who would you be without the thought that happiness depends on someone else?

What you’re believing in the moment creates your suffering or your happiness.

Who would you be without your story?

I didn't fight or shame my thoughts, I questioned them, and they stopped shaming me.

Here’s how a child listens: you tell him something, and he puts his own interpretation on what you said. That’s what he hears. No one has ever heard you.

Pay close attention to the particular thoughts you use to deprive yourself of happiness.

Discomfort is the call to set yourself free.

Any story that you tell about yourself causes suffering. There is no authentic story.

The person who finds peace inside and lives it, is the one who teaches what true peace is.

You’ve never reacted to someone else. You project meaning onto nothing. And you react to the meaning you’ve projected

Once we begin to question our thoughts, our partners-alive, dead or divorced-are always our greatest teachers. There's no mistake about the person you're with; he or she is the perfect teacher for you, whether or not the relationship works out, and once you enter inquiry, you come to see that clearly.

Life is simple. Everything happens for you, not to you.

The mind usually says, “I know, I know, I know.” But the “don’t-know mind” is where wisdom lives.

If you are an enemy to your own mind, other people have to become enemies too, sooner or later. Until you understand, until you can love the thoughts that appear in your mind, then you can love the rest of us. You work with the projector -the mind - not the projected world. I can't really love you until I question the mind that thinks it sees you outside itself . . .