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The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Martha Beck Quotes

What happens when we’re willing to feel bad is that, sure enough, we often feel bad – but without the stress of futile avoidance. Emotional discomfort, when accepted, rises, crests, and falls in a series of waves. Each wave washes parts of us away and deposits treasures we never imagined.

– Martha Beck

If you’re totally sedentary and eat 2,500 calories a day, don’t instantly go to 1,200 calories and hours of aerobics – your weight loss will be sudden and violent, but also fleeting.

– Martha Beck

There are several ways to mess up your life by fighting to make your calendar age match your felt age. I live in the Southwest, a part of the country with more than its share of fair skies, material wealth, and people who are trying not to be as old as they are.

– Martha Beck

When I tell a woman you really need to quit your soul-sucking job, she goes home, and she can tell her husband, ‘I need to quit,’ and he’s like, ‘O.K., let’s do it.’

– Martha Beck

As much horror as we have always created, we are a species that keeps moving forward, seeing new sights in new ways, and enjoying the journey.

– Martha Beck

Something in the human psyche confuses beauty with the right to be loved. The briefest glance at human folly reveals that good looks and worthiness operate independently. Yet countless socializing forces, from Aunt Clara to the latest perfume ad, reinforce beliefs like ‘If I were pretty enough, I would be loved.’

– Martha Beck

Absolutely lonely people have few personal interactions of any kind.

– Martha Beck

Sacred play is anything that takes you into that right hemisphere of your brain. It turns out that this move away from left to the right hemisphere, that sense of expansiveness and everything, can be accomplished through unusual rhythmic action, or any action that requires so much attention away from words that you cannot think in words.

– Martha Beck

Seek art from every time and place, in any form, to connect with those who really move you.

– Martha Beck

My point is that perceptual bias can affect nut jobs and scientists alike. If we hold too rigidly to what we think we know, we ignore or avoid evidence of anything that might change our mind.

– Martha Beck

I don’t believe that there are no spiritual beings around us. I don’t know what to call them, I don’t know how they work. But I know they’re there.

– Martha Beck

I practice staying calm all the time, beginning with situations that aren’t tense.

– Martha Beck

Good-looking individuals are treated better than homely ones in virtually every social situation, from dating to trial by jury. If everyday experience hasn’t convinced you of this, there’s research that will.

– Martha Beck

Good-looking individuals are treated better than homely ones in virtually every social situation, from dating to trial by jury.

– Martha Beck

Everything I’ve ever taught in terms of self-help boils down to this – I cannot believe people keep paying me to say this – if something feels really good for you, you might want to do it. And if it feels really horrible, you might want to consider not doing it. Thank you, give me my $150.

– Martha Beck

Instead of fretting about getting everything done, why not simply accept that being alive means having things to do? Then drop into full engagement with whatever you’re doing, and let the worry go.

– Martha Beck

Painful events leave scars, true, but it turns out they’re largely erasable. Jill Bolte Taylor, the neuroanatomist who had a stroke that obliterated her memory, described the event as losing ’37 years of emotional baggage.’

– Martha Beck

I had a client who was a professional baseball player once, and he would go to clubs and dance for seven, eight, nine hours at a time. He wouldn’t drink, he wouldn’t take drugs – he just danced because he had so much physical energy; he was this amazing athlete.

– Martha Beck

To make an activity joyful, keep adding things until the activity as a whole becomes more appealing than repulsing.

– Martha Beck

Expectation loiters in the DNA of every sentient being; when you tell yourself or a loved one, ‘Don’t get your hopes up,’ you’re fighting ancient genetic programming.

– Martha Beck

Children who assume adult responsibilities feel old when they’re young.

– Martha Beck

Only since the Industrial Revolution have most people worked in places away from their homes or been left to raise small children without the help of multiple adults, making for an unsupported life.

– Martha Beck

Fact: From quitting smoking to skiing, we succeed to the degree we try, fail, and learn. Studies show that people who worry about mistakes shut down, but those who are relaxed about doing badly soon learn to do well. Success is built on failure.

– Martha Beck

No one else can take risks for us, or face our losses on our behalf, or give us self-esteem. No one can spare us from life’s slings and arrows, and when death comes, we meet it alone.

– Martha Beck

Standards of beauty are arbitrary. Body shame exists only to the extent that our physiques don’t match our own beliefs about how we should look.

– Martha Beck

Even if you can be the world’s best at one thing, you’ll be the world’s worst at something else. Supermodels make pathetic sumo wrestlers.

– Martha Beck

What laughter is to childhood, sex is to adolescence.

– Martha Beck

Denial exists because human infants, though equipped with trust-o-meters, are built to trust, blindly and absolutely, any older person who wanders past.

– Martha Beck

Our ideas about love and attractiveness are so primal, our need for belonging so intense, that most of us are loath to abandon our favorite beliefs on these issues. If you’ve ever let yourself feel lovable and lovely, only to be deeply hurt, you may see accepting your own body as a setup for severe emotional wounding.

– Martha Beck

To complete your daily mental hygiene, observe any part of you that is upset or anxious, and offer that part of yourself the following simple wishes: ‘May you be well. May you be happy. May you be free from suffering.’ Repeat this until you actually mean it.

– Martha Beck

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