Lisa Ling Quotes

Whatever I have not yet learned to tolerate in myself inevitably will appear in my children. In this way, they, like Julia, guide me to a new level of self-awareness and everyone benefits.

Folks are always talking about 40 acres and a mule, but what we need is some psychoanalysis. Forget 40 acres in a mule: sign all of us up for some shrinks so we can get ourselves right by reflecting and truly learning ourselves.

I'm so blessed to have such enlightened parents. It must have been very hard to watch their able-bodied son lock himself up in his old room for most of his 20s.

I think you have to know who you are. Get to know the monster that lives in your soul, dive deep into your soul and explore it.

I think I started learning lessons about being a good person long before I ever knew what basketball was. And that starts in the home, it starts with the parental influence.

Growing up, my mom was very strict about how I dressed and how I behaved, and I said to myself that I wasn't going to be like that. But now I know I'm going to be exactly like my mom. I'm going to be worse!

The biggest lesson I've learned from my children is to look in the mirror at myself, not at them. I've realized that everything I've done has had an impact on them. We have to understand that they are like little paparazzi. They take our picture when we don't want them to and then they show it to us in their behavior.

The older I get the more of my mother I see in myself.

Our parents have, by far, the greatest influence on shaping who we are and how we deal with the world.

There's a period of life when we swallow a knowledge of ourselves and it becomes either good or sour inside.

I have spent a lot of time studying the issue of relationships, how I grew up, my parents' influence on me. I've talked to a therapist,; I've looked inward spiritually at myself, and what it seems to come down to is that I'm a Sagittarius. Please don't make me reveal more than that. It's tough enough as it is.

If you see in your children most of your own faults, you have failed as a parent, but succeeded as a neurotic.

I think over time you learn to know a bit more about yourself - you develop a certain amount of self-insight and self-awareness, and you know what you can absorb, and what you cannot; what gets to you and what doesn't.

And how we become like our parents! How their scorned advice - based, we felt in our superiority, on prejudices and muddled folk wisdom - how their opinions are subsequently borne out by our own discoveries and sense of the world, one after one. And as this happens, we realise with increasing horror that proposition which we would never have entertained before: our mothers were right!

Wouldn't have no knowledge of wealth, without no knowledge of self.

The good life consists in deriving happiness by using your signature strengths every day in the main realms of living. The meaningful life adds one more component: using these same strengths to forward knowledge, power or goodness.

Drama aids self-discovery like nothing else. In removing it from our schools, we remove the inestimable benefits of it from our society. No amount of studying oxbow lakes was ever going to help me emotionally through the death of my father.

Knowing others is wisdom, knowing yourself is Enlightenment.

I thought I was going to school to be other people, but really, what I learned was to be myself - accepting myself, my strengths and weaknesses.

When I wrote 'Runaways,' I was a naive kid who thought that all parents were evil. Now that I'm a wise old man with children of my own, I am certain that all parents are evil.

They say that people teach what they need to learn. By adopting the role of happiness teacher, if only for myself, I was trying to find the method to conquer my particular faults and limitations.

In actual fact, I've never been one, even from childhood, to kind of analyze myself very much.

It's good for everyone to understand that they are to love their enemies, simply because your enemies show you things about yourself you need to change. So in actuality enemies are friends in reverse.

Most of us don't spend any time knowing ourselves. We just keep reacting.

I've had times in my life when I really haven't been able to figure myself out.