Byron Katie Quotes

A thought is harmless unless we believe it.

You speak what you believe, and you believe you’re doomed. If there’s one thing I’ve learned throughout the years, it’s that what you believe is the impetus for your entire life.

The only time we suffer is when we believe a thought that argues with what is. When the mind is perfectly clear, what is is what we want.

We are what we think.

To a Buddhist, contradictions only exist in a mind that has been forced to cultivate them.

To an experienced Zen Buddhist, asking if one believes in Zen or one believes in the Buddha, sounds a little ludicrous, like asking if one believes in air or water. Similarly Quality is not something you believe in, Quality is something you experience.

People are said to believe in God, or to disbelieve in Adam and Eve. But in such cases what is believed or disbelieved is that there is an entity answering a certain description. This, which can be believed or disbelieved is quite different from the actual entity (if any) which does answer the description. Thus the matter of belief is, in all cases, different in kind from the matter of sensation or presentation, and error is in no way analogous to hallucination. A hallucination is a fact, not an error; what is erroneous is a judgment based upon it.

I know that even at moments of apparent danger, nothing is out of order or lacking, other than our own unquestioned thoughts about those moments.

The world begins with what we believe.

The first lesson about trusting your senses is: don't. Just because you believe something to be true, just because you know it's true, that doesn't mean it is true.

Your thoughts do not create reality, but they do create your experience.

Reality is what we take to be true. What we take to be true is what we believe. What we believe is based upon our perceptions. What we perceive depends upon what we look for. What we look for depends upon what we think. What we think depends upon what we perceive. What we perceive determines what we believe. What we believe determines what we take to be true. What we take to be true is our reality.

It's quite an amazing experience to see the same life with and without the thought. We come to see how crazy a thought can make us when we believe it.

You can only see what you believe—nothing else is possible.

It's not what happens in life that bothers us. It's what we're believing about it that bothers us.

But when one believes in the reality of things, making them visible by artificial means is not quite the same as feeling that they are close at hand.

He who is attached to things will suffer much.

Reality - the way that is, exactly as it is, in every moment - is always kind. It's our story about reality that blurs our vision, obscures what's true, and leads us to believe that there is injustice in the world. I sometimes say that you move totally away from reality when you believe that there is a legitimate reason to suffer.

Whatever you believe, you become.

A fear is just a lie that you've rehearsed so many times you believe it's true.

Once we see that everything is impermanent and ungraspable and that we create a huge amount of suffering if we are attached to things staying the same, we realize that relaxing and letting go is a wiser way to live. Letting go does not mean not caring about things. It means caring about them in a flexible and wise way.

Attachment is a manufacturer of illusion and whoever wants reality ought to be detached.

It's not possible to have a problem without believing a prior thought. To notice this simple truth is the beginning of peace.

You believe that you are your mind. This is the delusion.

It is remarkable how liberating it feels to be able to see that your thoughts are just thoughts and that they are not 'you' or 'reality.' For instance, if you have the thought that you have to get a certain number of things done today and you don't recognize it as a thought but act as if it's the 'the truth,' then you have created a reality in that moment in which you really believe that those things must all be done today.