Kurt Elling Quotes

I don't torture myself.

A toothache, or a violent passion, is not necessarily diminished by our knowledge of its causes, its character, its importance or insignificance.

When I believed my thoughts I suffered.

It is clear to me that one of the biggest obstacles we face as human beings is the pain we put ourselves through when we resist and wrestle with our emotions.

Almost all our suffering is the product of our thoughts. We spend nearly every moment of our lives lost in thought, and hostage to the character of those thoughts. You can break this spell, but it takes training just like it takes training to defend yourself against a physical assault.

I try to keep away exterior events that are going to make me do something negative internally to myself.

I used to have to think about awful things to get myself emotionally connected to something.

I believe there are more urgent and honorable occupations than the incomparable waste of time we call suffering.

If you think negatively, it's hard to get out of tense moments.

Only allow yourself to think negative thoughts and/or complain about anything for three minutes, three times a day.

It's time we learned the truth about stress. It's time we identified the thoughts that actually create our stress and learned to dismantle them one by one.

People don't just get upset. They contribute to their upsetness.

I've spent a lot of time and money trying to keep my anger in control.

I'm a very emotional person. If I've got something on my mind, that would stop me from giving my best.

I'm trying to stay as calm as possible and focus one day at a time, but when reality sets in, I feel everything: anxiety, excitement, nerves, pressure and joy.

The truth is that there is no actual stress or anxiety in the world; it's your thoughts that create these false beliefs. You can't package stress, touch it, or see it. There are only people engaged in stressful thinking.

Every time you feel depressed about something, try to identify a corresponding negative thought you had just prior to and during the depression. Because these thoughts have actually created your bad mood, by learning to restructure them, you can change your mood.

Many persons swear by positive thinking, and quite a few have been helped by it. Nevertheless, it is not a very effective tool and can be downright harmful in some cases.

Remember that stress doesn't come from what's going on in your life. It comes from your thoughts about what's going on in your life.

I don't know how to ground myself without the other actor present.

I think there's a danger, for me at least, in retreating and going inward and depression. I have to stay diligent against that tendency.

I'm not a sad person, upset the whole time, but I seem to be quite emotional.

When I say manage emotions, I only mean the really distressing, incapacitating emotions. Feeling emotions is what makes life rich. You need your passions.

I'm constantly having to be vigilant with a depressive tendency, an addictive tendency.

I wish I could throw off the thoughts which poison my happiness, but I take a kind of pleasure in indulging them.