31 Quotes by Brad Blanton

It’s not normal to be honest. What is normal is to be concerned foremost with having a good cover story. Normal people are concerned with figuring out the right thing to say that puts them in the best light. They want to live up to their own best guess about what the people they are talking to want to hear.

We all lie like hell. It wears us out. It is the major source of all human stress. Lying kills people.

They concluded that every suicide can be explained as “an attempt to maintain or enhance the self.” The mind is maintained at the expense of the life of the being. The mind survives by being right. The mind would rather be right and die than be wrong and live.

The problem is that ideas about forgiveness are not forgiveness. They don’t even help. What you are left with is the experience of resentment and the concept of forgiveness and a deteriorating relationship.

Therapy is over when a person stops incessantly demanding that other people be different from what they are, forgives his or her parents and other begrudged former intimates, reclaims the power to make life work, and takes responsibility for doing so.

The stress that kills or cripples most of the population comes from people being too hard on themselves when they don’t live up to their own imaginings about how other people think they should behave.

When you are lying, when you are keeping a secret, when you are withholding information or feelings in any moment, you are always doing that to protect something meaningless.

For my own good, I want to hang out with people who want to find out what it would be like to live in such a way as to leave no unspoken words, no unfinished business; I want to be with people who are hungry for the truth, who want to spend time learning and sharing what they have learned rather than defending their images or reputations.

What is true changes, so we can’t tell the truth once and be done with it. It’s an ongoing game.