Vernon Howard Quotes

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

You are not responsible for anyone who stubbornly chooses to ruin his own life.

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

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

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

Bitterness is the outcome of a wrong mental movement - the attempt to force external events to conform to internal fantasy. The cure is to see fantasy as fantasy, which will reveal it as neither necessary nor rewarding.

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

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.

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.

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

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?

The power of fantasy is so strong that people think they are having a good time when they are merely wasting money.

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

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.

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