The Choice

by Edith Eger

I don’t like to jump to hospitalization if there’s any chance of success with a therapeutic intervention.

in choosing not to face the past and myself directly, decades after my literal imprisonment had ended, I was still choosing not to be free.

I haven’t yet learned that the problem isn’t that my sisters taunt me with a mean song; the problem is that I believe them.

Anti-Semitism wasn’t a Nazi invention.

competition and domination get you nowhere, cooperation is the name of the game;

We can choose what the horror teaches us. To become bitter in our grief and fear. Hostile. Paralyzed. Or to hold on to the childlike part of us, the lively and curious part, the part that is innocent.

The war does not end anti-Semitism.

be passive is to let others decide for you. To be aggressive is to decide for others. To be assertive is to decide for yourself. And to trust that there is enough, that you are enough.

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way. Each moment is a choice. No matter how frustrating or boring or constraining or painful or oppressive our experience, we can always choose how we respond. And I finally begin to understand that I, too, have a choice. This realization will change my life.

Israel wasn’t an easy place for survivors; it’s not easy to live amid prejudice and not become an aggressor yourself.

Before you say or do something, ask, Is it kind? Is it important? Does it help?

Anger, however consuming, is never the most important emotion. It is only the very outer edge, the thinly exposed top layer of a much deeper feeling.

sometimes the worst moments in our lives, the moments that set us spinning with ugly desires, that threaten to unglue us with the sheer impossibility of the pain we must endure, are in fact the moments that bring us to understand our worth.

“But to save yourself, you are going to have to give up the image of who you think you’re supposed to be.”

Maybe to heal isn’t to erase the scar, or even to make the scar. To heal is to cherish the wound.

Has my generation taught the youth well enough to prevent another Holocaust from occurring? Or will our hard-won freedom capsize in a new sea of hate?

Our painful experiences aren’t a liability—they’re a gift. They give us perspective and meaning, an opportunity to find our unique purpose and our strength.

Strength isn’t reacting, it’s responding—feeling your feelings, thinking them over, and planning an effective action to bring you closer to your goal.

Doing what is right is rarely the same as doing what is safe.