Pema Chodron Quotes

I know not anything more pleasant, or more instructive, than to compare experience with expectation, or to register from time to time the difference between idea and reality. It is by this kind of observation that we grow daily less liable to be disappointed.

You have to accept the way things are before you can move on.

I avoided reality for most of my life. But once you deal with it, it's kind of cool.

Wisdom may best arise from a humbling reality.

Once you are a parent, everything takes a back seat. It ceases to be a role. It is a reality. Once I had Ranveer, I realised that I was cracking under the pressure and that I cannot be a superwoman. I had to open myself to learning.

Life's harsh. You can't escape what you are and what you project.

From the moment we are born, people tell us that the world is like this and like that, this way, that way. It is natural that - for a certain period of time - we end up believing what we are told. But we must soon push these ideas aside and discover our own way of living reality.

Melancholy and remorse form the deep leaden keel which enables us to sail into the wind of reality; we run aground sooner than the flat-bottomed pleasure-lovers but we venture out in weather that would sink them and we choose our direction.

The distinction between pretending you are better than you are and beginning to be better in reality is finer than moral sleuth hounds conceive.

I think there are definitely things over the last year-and-a-half we would have done differently, ... I think we've at least learned as we go and hopefully we don't make the same mistake next time. ... I think if I said anything different to you, I'd be removed from reality.

Your reality is yours. Stop wasting time looking at someone else's reality while doing nothing about yours.

Doffing the ego's safe glory, he finds his naked reality.

You keep learning how to let go and to live the life that you actually have, as opposed to the life you thought you were going to have.

As we practice, we begin to know the difference between our fantasy and reality.

For now realize that you can change anything you want, but you can't change everything you want.

... the stranger is not a threat but an opportunity to grow in my view of reality, to grow in my own sense of possibility

For the beloved should not allow me to turn my infantile fantasies into reality: On the contrary, he should help me to go beyond them.

But for me at any rate it was all part of dissolving the God trip or father-figure trip. Facing up to reality instead of always looking for some kind of heaven.

Reality is painful -- it's so much easier to keep doing stuff you know you're good at or else to pick something so hard there's no point at which it's obvious you're failing -- but it's impossible to get better without confronting it.

It can be scary to find out you've been wrong about something but we can't be afraid to change our minds, to accept that things are different, that they'll never be the same, for better or for worse. We have to be willing to give up what we used to believe. The more we're willing to accept what is and not what we thought, we'll find ourselves exactly where we belong.

You're human. You'll screw up. Denying that is crazy. Forgiving yourself has all the benefits of self-esteem without making you a narcissist that's out of touch with reality.

It took the real thing to show you the size of your delusions.

If I had faced it then, I wouldn't be facing it now, but sooner or later you have to choose between running and facing the thing you thought you could not face.

If the image one holds of one's self contains elements that don't square with reality, one is best advised to let go of them, however difficult that may be.

Let us face ourselves bravely as we are. For only a philosophy that recognizes reality can lead us into true happiness, and only that kind of philosophy is sound and healthy.