Common Irrational Beliefs

1. The idea that you must have love or approval from all the significant people in your life.

2. The idea that you absolutely must be thoroughly competent, adequate, and achieving or The idea that you must be competent or talented in some important area.

3. The idea that other people absolutely must not act obnoxiously and unfairly, and, that when they do, you should blame and damn them, and see them as bad, wicked, or rotten individuals.

4. The idea that you have to see things as being awful, terrible, and catastrophic when you are seriously frustrated or treated unfairly.

5. The idea that you must be miserable when you have pressures and difficult experiences; and that you have little ability to control, and cannot change, your disturbed feelings.

6. The idea that if something is dangerous or fearsome, you must obsess about it and frantically try to escape from it.

7. The idea that you can easily avoid facing many difficulties and self-responsibilities and still lead a highly fulfilling existence .

8. The idea that your past remains all-important and because something once strongly influenced your life, it has to keep determining your feelings and behavior today.

9. The idea that people and things absolutely must be better than they are and that it is awful and horrible if you cannot change life’s grim facts to suit you.

10. The idea that you can achieve maximum happiness by inertia and inaction or by passively and uncommittedly enjoying yourself.

Some essential quotes from Viktor Frankl and Man’s Search for Meaning

1. When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.
2. Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.
3. What is to give light must endure burning.
4. Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.
5. I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love.
6. Each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.
7. Live as if you were living a second time, and as though you had acted wrongly the first time.
8. Fear may come true that which one is afraid of.
9. Ever more people today have the means to live, but no meaning to live for.
10. Challenging the meaning of life is the truest expression of the state of being human.

Eckart Tolle’s Top Ten Quotes:

1) The past has no power over the present moment.

2) Some changes look negative on the surface but you will soon realize that space is being created in your life for something new to emerge.

3) The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but your thoughts about it.

4) Always say “yes” to the present moment. What could be more futile, more insane, than to create inner resistance to what already is? What could be more insane than to oppose life itself, which is now and always now? Surrender to what is. Say “yes” to life — and see how life suddenly starts working for you rather than against you.

5) Being spiritual has nothing to do with what you believe and everything to do with your state of consciousness.

6) Accept – then act. Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it. Always work with it, not against it.

7) You do not become good by trying to be good, but by finding the goodness that is already within you, and allowing that goodness to emerge. But it can only emerge if something fundamental changes in your state of consciousness.

8) As soon as you honor the present moment, all unhappiness and struggle dissolve, and life begins to flow with joy and ease. When you act out the present-moment awareness, whatever you do becomes imbued with a sense of quality, care, and love – even the most simple action.

9) The moment that judgement stops through acceptance of what it is, you are free of the mind. You have made room for love, for joy, for peace.

10) When you don’t cover up the world with words and labels, a sense of the miraculous returns to your life that was lost a long time ago when humanity, instead of using thought, became possessed by thought.