Michael Greger Quotes

My son, who's on the spectrum is a very rigid thinker. He needs clear-cut definitions of right and wrong. Anything hazy or gray confuses him. For instance, if I try to get him to see that a friend behaved badly, he'll often get upset with me because a friend is a 'good guy' by definition, in his book.

What's a dancer's worst enemy? Sometimes it's age, but sometimes it's the dancer themselves.

I was very immature when I was young, and for me there was no balance. Everything was just all or nothing.

People have a hard time letting go of their suffering. Out of a fear of the unknown, they prefer suffering that is familiar.

Comfort zones are plush lined coffins. When you stay in your plush lined coffins, you die.

So many people prefer to live in drama because it's comfortable. It's like someone staying in a bad marriage or relationship - it's actually easier to stay because they know what to expect every day, versus leaving and not knowing what to expect.

I'm one extreme or the other. I'm not good at doing moderation.

What is it about women that they just go right for the guy that totally repulses them?

When your hobbies get in the way of your work - that's OK; but when your hobbies get in the way of themselves... well.

Every few years I'll party way too much to remind myself what an idiot I am.

I drink too much, I smoke too much, I take pills too much, I work too much, I girl around too much, I everything too much.

Getting bogged down in old stories stops the flow of learning by censoring our perceptions, making us functionally deaf and blind to new information. Once the replay button gets pushed, we no longer form new ideas or conclusions - the old ones are so cozy.

Little men with little minds and little imaginations go through life in little ruts, smugly resisting all changes which would jar their little worlds.

I got so used to being unstable that I started to only be comfortable being unstable.

We walk ourselves into ruts so deep we cannot see over them.

'Salaryitis' is when you become so accustomed to that salary that you no longer have the gumption to pull out of the rut and strike out on your own. It destroys the nerve of ambitious, imaginative men, and bowing to it has meant sure defeat for more people than any other sickness, mental or physical.

I can't stand the kind of paralysis that some people fall into because they're not happy with the choices they've made.

One of the things that 'Too Bright' refers to is how there's a lot of times where I see things that I could change that could make me more contented, but I usually just don't make those changes because they seem new and scary. I just stay where I'm at, even if I'm miserable, because I'm familiar with it.

Many of us stay in situations that don't serve us because we don't want to confront the fact that we've failed.

In reality, I was drowning in negativity. I was stuck playing a part, too afraid to change, too afraid of losing my readers if I suddenly stopped being so mean.

I think we're often guilty of gravitating towards the familiar. Even if we recognize that certain patterns are unsatisfying and destructive, there can still be a comfort in the familiar recognition of a cycle repeating itself.

My therapist says I'm afraid of success. I guess I could understand that, because after all, fulfilling my potential would REALLY cut into my sitting-around time

I feel guilty about smoking way too much - and I have a bit of an addiction to chocolate milk shakes, which is not good.

I began dividing life in absolutes... Things and people were either perfectly bad, or perfectly good, and when life didn't obey this black-and-white rule, when things or people were complex or contradictory, I pretended otherwise. I turned every defeat into a disaster, every success into an epic triumph, and separated all people into heroes or villains. Unable to bear ambiguity, I built a barricade of delusions against it.

We sabotage our creative possibilities because the world revealed by our imagination may not fit well with the life we have taken so much trouble to construct over the years. Faced with the pain of that distance, the distance between desire and reality, we turn just for a moment and quickly busy ourselves.