Paul Rust Quotes

As much as you may want to, you can't control what other people say or do; you can only control yourself.

Every man is crucified upon the cross of himself.

Do I create conflicts for myself? Sure I do.

Only I can change my life. No one can do it for me.

The primary cause of disorder in ourselves is the seeking of reality promised by another

I was starting to come to grips with the fact that I had created a lot of pain and suffering around me, not just within me.

Sometimes you think the whole world is falling, and it's only yourself that's leaning.

Instead of always asking yourself why so-and-so acts this or that way, learn to ask: "What's inside of me that wants to hurt itself over how anyone else acts?"

How can we resent the life we've created for ourselves?

Ourselves are to ourselves the cause of ill.

When we question our thoughts, we see that the craziness was never in the world, but in us.

As Lucretius says: 'Thus ever from himself doth each man flee.' But what does he gain if he does not escape from himself? He ever follows himself and weighs upon himself as his own most burdensome companion. And so we ought to understand that what we struggle with is the fault, not of the places, but of ourselves

It's very hard to look in the mirror. We all know this. It's much easier to have illusions about yourself. And in particular, when you think, well, I'm going to believe what I like, but I'll say what the powerful want, you do that over time, and you believe what you say.

No matter what you do, you'll never run away from you.

Don't worry about what other people are doing. Worry about what you're doing.

The self is like a pimping blackmailing chauffeur who gets you from here to there on word lines.

I think that every living person, every person who is awake to the functioning principles within his reality has a moment where he stops blaming the problems in the world on group thinking, on humanity and authority, and starts to face himself. I hate this more than anything. This is the hardest principle within christian spirituality for me to deal with. The problem is not out there, the problem is the needy beast of a thing living in my chest.

Does our ferocity not derive from the fact that our instincts are all too interested in other people? If we attended more to ourselves and became the center, the object of our murderous inclinations, the sum of our intolerances would diminish.

The responsibility for change...lies within us. We must begin with ourselves, teaching ourselves not to close our minds prematurely to the novel, the surprising, the seemingly radical.

Tis in ourselves that we are thus, or thus.

It is we ourselves that we have to think about, no one else. That is the way the saints worked. They paid attention to what they were doing, and if others were attracted to them by their enterprise, why, well and good. But they looked to themselves first of all.

The hardest thing is remembering that you have some complicity in the things that happen to you in your life.

There is a powerful craving in most of us to see ourselves as instruments in the hands of others and thus free ourselves from the responsibility for acts which are prompted by our own questionable inclinations and impulses.

Your suffering is never caused by the person you're blaming.

One can run away from anything but oneself.