Vernon Howard Quotes

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.

Whether a person is aware of it or not, he is assaulted constantly by misleading and hostile voices within the mind. They speak both through you and to you. Everyone is their target, but because of their extreme cunning, few people ever detect and dismiss them. So the only problem is a lack of information about these foreign voices. The curing facts are as close as your desire for them. It is extremely important for you to remember the following truth: these hurtful voices are not you, and they do not belong to you, but merely speak through your psychic system. Don't take them as being your own voices, any more than you take radio voices as being your own. They simply use unaware human beings. Your true nature has nothing to do with them. When finally dismissing these sinister speakers you make room for spiritual health and true life.

It is not a disaster to discover that you are not the person you assumed you were. To the contrary, it is the beginning of the end of disaster. Experiment: How you feel if you were neither a success or failure in life? How would you feel if you were neither popular nor unwanted?

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

Everyone has imaginary ideas of himself as being this or that sort of person. And you can be sure that the images are highly complimentary! But since they are purely imaginary, they are highly sensitive to assault by reality.

God himself has made it possible for you to live without the dark place and the pains that rush out and flood out and take you over. Your choice of wanting to see and work is essential to you if you want to get rid of your feeling of emptiness, of futility. You've lied to yourself and said, 'I know what to do to get rid of the pain.' You've never gotten rid of the pain and that's evidence of self-deceit. You have to stop playing cruel tricks on yourself. So stop. Now.

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

The delusion of having wisdom creates the dangerous delusion of having power, leading to disaster.

Honestly face your inner poverty as a means of discovering your inner wealth.

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

Self-righteousness loves to pounce on an evil which by sheer accident is not its particular evil.

Try to see what attitudes rule your day, then ask what kind of a day you usually have.

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

Take disturbance as an awakening sign that you misunderstand something you assumed you understood.

To win real rewards, we must firmly decline the deceptive rewards offered by society.