Alan Cohen Quotes

Many people don't know about the power of good feelings, and so their feelings are reactions or responses to what happens to them. They have put their feelings on automatic pilot, instead of deliberately taking charge of them.

No one can make you feel anything you don't already feel.

You, and you alone, get to determine whether you are going to react positively about something or negatively about something - or, interestingly, have no reaction at all. Your emotions are entirely under your control. Your feelings are what you want them to be.

It is therefore senseless to think of complaining since nothing foreign has decided what we feel, what we live, or what we are.

It is you who are choosing, in any moment, to be happy or choosing to be sad, or choosing to be angry, or forgiving, or enlightened, or whatever. You are choosing.

Feelings are determined by how one chooses to respond to various situations and events.

As you age, you start to realize that your emotions are in your hands and not someone else's. Once you put them in someone else's hands, that's when you give them the power, and you can't change it. Only they can change it.

Emotion is something that you don't simply receive. Emotion is compelled. Other than that, we're just shells until we're possessed or reanimated from time to time by different emotions.

I only can control what I can control.

I'm going to make decisions that I think are best for me and my family. So, when I make these decisions, of course I'm going to ask people for advice, but at the end of the day, Brandon Jennings makes the decisions. And I feel like the decisions that I've made so far have been successful.

If you continue to blame other people for “making” you feel guilty, they still have power over you, and you are saying that you will only feel good when they stop doing that. You are giving them control over your life. Stop blaming other people.

If our feelings control our actions, it is because we have abdicated our responsibility and empowered them to do so.

The bottom line is that you are the one who is creating your life the way it is. The life you currently live is the result of all your past thoughts and actions. You are in charge of your current thoughts and your present feelings.

Know that no one is capable of making you upset without your consent.

As human beings, we are responsible for our own lives. Our behavior is a function of our decisions, not our conditions. We can subordinate feelings to values.

You can only control your own actions. Not other people’s reactions.

We must become masters of our own actions and attitudes. To let another person determine whether we will be rude or gracious, elated or depressed is to give control of ourselves. The only true possession is self possession.

There is really no reason to suffer. The only reason you suffer is because you choose to suffer. If you look at your life you will find many excuses to suffer, but a good reason to suffer you will not find. The same is true for happiness. The only reason you are happy is because you choose to be happy. Happiness is a choice, and so is suffering.

I really can't tell other people how to live their life or how to approach different things. What I can tell them - and I truly believe this, I don't think it's being naïve and I don't think it's being in denial - I really believe that the way you think influences the way you feel, and the way you feel influences the way you act.

Obviously, circumstances alone do not make us happy or unhappy. It is the way we react to circumstances that determines our feelings. Jesus said that the kingdom of heaven is within you. That is where the kingdom of hell is, too.

It's not what people do to us that hurts us. In the most fundamental sense, it is our chosen response to what they do to us that hurts us.

Having feelings doesn't mean you have to have sex.

External circumstances do not create feeling states. Feeling states create external circumstances.

...no one can do a thing about feelings, they exist and there's no way to censor them. We can reproach ourselves for some action, for a remark, but not for a feeling, quite simply because we have no control at all over it.

Sometimes people leave you Halfway through the wood Others may decieve you You decide what's good You decide alone But no one is alone