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Self-improvement books, friends, and polite strangers often tell soothing lies about our physical appearance that prevent many of us from facing, discussing, and solving our real problems.
Martha Beck -
The way we can allow ourselves to do what we need to, no matter what others may say or do, is to choose love and defy fear.
Martha Beck
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As soon as you think you know someone else's truth better than they do, you are in deep water.
Martha Beck -
When fear makes your choices for you, no security measures on earth will keep the things you dread from finding you. But if you can avoid avoidance - if you can choose to embrace experiences out of passion, enthusiasm, and a readiness to feel whatever arises - then nothing, nothing in all this dangerous world, can keep you from being safe.
Martha Beck -
Polite strangers often tell soothing lies about our physical appearance that prevent many of us from facing, discussing and solving our real problems.
Martha Beck -
We virtually never feel our age, but thinking that we should can lead to disaster.
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 feel about aging the way William Saroyan said he felt about death: Everybody has to do it, but I always believed an exception would be made in my case.
Martha Beck
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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 -
Adults under threat feel like children.
Martha Beck -
The most common reason we stumble into the delusion of powerlessness is that we're afraid of what other people would do or say or feel if we were to act as we wanted.
Martha Beck -
As I obsess about my ancient problems, I feel more like I'm sinking in quicksand than lighting a torch. I'm creating neither heat nor light, just the icky, perversely pleasurable squish of self-pity between my toes. My only defense is that I'm not the only one down here in the muck - our whole culture is doting on tales of personal tragedy.
Martha Beck -
Seek art from every time and place, in any form, to connect with those who really move you.
Martha Beck -
The thing I love most about my job is watching people age backward, becoming more lively and energetic as they free themselves from situations that are toxic to their essential selves.
Martha Beck
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For the vast majority of world history, human life - both culture and biology - was shaped by scarcity. Food, clothing, shelter, tools, and pretty much everything else had to be farmed or fabricated, at a very high cost in time and energy.
Martha Beck -
The way we do anything is the way we do everything.
Martha Beck -
Absolutely lonely people have few personal interactions of any kind.
Martha Beck -
Good-looking individuals are treated better than homely ones in virtually every social situation, from dating to trial by jury.
Martha Beck -
Every day brings new choices.
Martha Beck -
Tiny steps will get you to your goal months and months sooner. A little is better than a lot.
Martha Beck
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If you're living completely on your own, break out of solitary confinement. Seek to understand others, and help them understand you.
Martha Beck -
No matter how difficult and painful it may be, nothing sounds as good to the soul as the truth.
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 -
Do whatever it takes to convey your essential self.
Martha Beck