David Seabury Quotes

How on earth do people imagine we equip children for life if we never show them the sorts of issues other people encounter, if we never talk through with them how they might deal with difficulty or violence or unexpected shocks and surprises?

There are no problems in the world. There are just situations. Some situations you know how to handle. Some you do not know how to handle.

If life becomes hard to bear we think of a change in our circumstances. But the most important and effective change, a change in our own attitude, hardly even occurs to us, and the resolution to take such a step is very difficult for us.

The key to happiness - as any good fairy godmother will tell you - is not to avoid problems, but to overcome them.

Being negative only makes a difficult journey more difficult. You may be given a cactus, but you don't have to sit on it.

Sometimes people let the same problem make them miserable for years when they could just say, So what. That's one of my favorite things to say. So what.

The only people without problems are those in cemeteries. It is not what happens to us that separates failures from successes. It is how we perceive and what we do about what happens that makes the difference.

Most of the time you need something to fight against. If something is bothering me, then the only way to get past it is to work through it.

If you are distressed by something, it is due to your own estimate of it; and you have the power to change it at will.

As long as you have a set of beliefs or lack of skills that make you feel you have at the effect of life, you're going to have enormous stress and the quality of your life will go down.

Dwelling on the negative simply contributes to its power.

You cannot change the outer event, so you must change the inner experience.

When a man has a problem very thoroughly and can't solve it, he really has too few problems. He needs more.

You don't get to choose if you get hurt in this world...but you do have some say in who hurts you. I like my choices.

Learn to eat problems for breakfast

You've just got to get over that mental hurdle and those battles in your own head during matches when things aren't going so well. It takes time. It's probably all things I already knew, but for someone to talk about it maybe in a different way makes you realise things.

What matters is not how well you can avoid trouble, but how you cope with trouble when it comes.

Men are disturbed not by the things that happen, but by their opinion of the things that happen.

Don Juan assured me that in order to accomplish the feat of making myself miserable I had to work in the most intense fashion, and that it was absurd. I had now realized I could work just the same in making myself complete and strong. "The trick is in what one emphasizes," he said. "We either make ourselves miserable, or we make ourselves strong. The amount of work is the same."

None of us can be free of conflict and woe. Even the greatest men have had to accept disappointments as their daily bread. ... The art of living lies less in eliminating our troubles than in growing with them.

Sometimes I think that's where most of us are. Fighting off the crazy as best we can. Trying to become something better than we were. It's that second bit that's important.

I'm a very sensitive person at times. Not just to words that anybody says, but in relationships for example, the people that you open up to, you listen to, you hear - you know? So a lot of times, the key to some of my vulnerability is just through things, simple things - or critiques or whatever - or could be very simple things that are said.

Problems are not my problem. It's not what happens to me but what happens in me that matters.

I do whatever pushes me hardest. It's coming at me and I try to... it's like uninvited guest and I have to wrestle them out the door or through the window - get them out and get over with them quickly.

The key is to never recognize these imbalances. To not let the dauntingness daunt us.