Vernon Howard Quotes

46 Sourced Quotes

What a dawning appears to the man or woman who earnestly inquires, 'Who is living my life for me?' Am I really thinking for myself or am I unknowingly projecting acquired ideas which may be all wrong?

Vernon Howard
You are not your cluster of memorized ideas about yourself. Awareness of this dissolves both the cluster and the belief that others can control you. If you have a self-image of being a desirable person, others can control you by flattering it, but can they control if you have no such image?

Vernon Howard
If you hand a man a lemon and tell him that its sourness lies outside the lemon, he will think you are joking. Yet, with a perfectly straight face, that same man will tell you that his sour life is caused by external events. When will man learn that he is the cause of his own feelings for either happiness or anxiety?

Vernon Howard
Human opinions are formed by accident and hardened by repetition. We cling to acquired opinions only because they give the illusion of being wise opinions. This creates division and hostility between people.

Vernon Howard
If we will repeatedly suffer the humiliation of admitting that we really do not know what we're talking about, eventually we will.

Vernon Howard
Mental sickness has set up a system by which it never loses. No matter what you do and no matter what the results are, you will win an ego-victory. That means that when you send your desires out into the world: 1. You will get what you want, or 2. You won't get what you want. Of you get what you want, the pseudo-nature says, "I have at last been given what I so richly deserve," and the sickness feels affirmed. If you don't get what you want, you feel sorry for yourself. You still feel affirmed because you get a feeling, and that's all that neurosis wants is a feeling.

Vernon Howard
When we associate with others we really associate with ourselves. We like or dislike in others whatever we like or dislike in ourselves.

Vernon Howard
The most marvelous experience of life is to transform life according to reality, not imagination.

Vernon Howard
A person obsessed with the need to be happy will never be so. The obsession is the obstruction. He does not really seek happiness, rather he seeks for a condition which matches his personal idea regarding the nature of happiness. But happiness is not a mere idea, for one idea will always have competition from another idea. The is why the unhappy man chases for ever from one attraction to another. Happiness will come when he stops chasing, that is, when he stops thinking that an idea about happiness is the same as happiness. A man enjoying the sunshine does so without analysing it.

Vernon Howard
We burden ourselves with useless ideas which we carelessly take as facts. Instead of letting reality come as a new surprise, we insist that it conform to our habitual concepts, and thus, we spoil everything.

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

Vernon Howard
You are not really bothered by what others think of you. You are bothered by what you think of yourself.

Vernon Howard
Trying to command life without studying one's own mind is like trying to play the piano without studying music.

Vernon Howard
Ask spiritual questions with intense integrity, and inspiring answers will surely arrive.

Vernon Howard
The only activities of true value are those which aim at inner transformation.

Vernon Howard
The less life in a person, the more he will try to live off your life.

Vernon Howard
If we choose the easy way, by letting another think for us, we must eventually tread the hard way. If we select the hard way, by insisting upon our own mental integrity, we eventually come to the easy way.

Vernon Howard
The power of the present moment is so immense it is capable - when lived in fully - of destroying forever every past mistake and regret.

Vernon Howard
Why do you permit a mere word to stand in your way? Forget the word "difficult" and take your next step.

Vernon Howard
The only way you're going to have a good relationship with anyone is to have a good relationship with yourself.

Vernon Howard
Remember that an answer to a difficulty resides at a higher level than our usual thinking, so seek this loftier level.

Vernon Howard
Mental silence is the perfect response to a challenge.

Vernon Howard
Consciously risk the loss of something before losing it, and you will lose the fear of losing it.

Vernon Howard
Astonishingly, if you will have absolutely nothing to do with suffering, suffering will have nothing to do with you.

Vernon Howard
Turning to God, Truth, Reality, simply means to let go, even fearfully at first, of our self-centered ideas.

Vernon Howard