Addiction/Obsession

"Freedom from obsession is not about something you do; it's about knowing who you are. It's about recognizing what sustains you and what exhausts you. What you love and what you think you love because you can't have it." Geneen Roth

Sacrifice and Cost

"The cost of a thing is the amount of what I call life which is required in exchange for it, immediately or in the long run."  Henry David Thoreau

Perhaps

"Perhaps we wouldn't eat so much or smoke, or drink so much, if we were paying attention to ourselves.   Perhaps we wouldn't talk so much if we were paying attention to each other.   All of these oral activities are trying to meet a need, and perhaps the greatest need is to be seen and heard."  Christina Baldwin

Perfection

"The pursuit of perfection has become a major addiction of our time.   Fortunately, perfectionism is learned.  No one is born a perfectionist, which is why it is possible to recover."   Rachel Naomi Remen

State of Being

"People are where they are because that's exactly where they really want to be...whether they'll admit it or not."  Earl Nightingale 

Our soft hearts

"Acting out and repressing are the main ways that we shield our hearts, the main ways that we never connect with our vulnerability, our compassion, our sense of the open, fresh dimension of our being.   By acting out or repressing we invite suffering, bewilderment, or confusion to intensify.   Instead of acting out or repressing-use the situation as an opportunity to touch that soft spot.  Underneath all that craving or aversion or jealousy or feeling wretched about yourself, underneath the hopelessness and despair and depression, there's something extremely soft.   Feel the wounded heart that is underneath the addiction, self-loathing or anger.  If someone comes along and shoots an arrow in your heart, it's fruitless to stand there and yell at the person.  It would be much better to turn your attention to the fact that there's an arrow in your heart."  Pema Chondron

Soul

"When the soul is neglected, it doesn't just go away; it appears symptomatically in obsessions, addictions, violence, and loss of meaning.   Our temptation is to isolate these symptoms or to try to eradicate them one by one; but the root problem is that we have lost our wisdom about the soul, even our interest in it.  We have today, few specialist of the soul to advise us."  Thomas Moore

Addiction, Cravings and Desire

"Cravings or longings that arise from desire for what was merely gratifying or pleasurable are not reliable guides to autonomy because they lead to  impulse and addiction.  We can never satisfy such cravings.   They are based on the absence of something we want (slenderness, sex, money, ideal life partner), which no longer seem so exciting if or when we get it."   Polly Young-Eisendrath

Addictive Thinking and Ego

"A succinct definition of addictive thinking is believing that you must have something external to yourself in order to avoid suffering..   The ego wants you to think/feel that you are incomplete so that it can keep you striving for something instead of looking within and knowing the peace and harmony of the sacred self."  Wayne Dyer

Addiction to the External

"If we become addicted to the external, our interiority will haunt us.   We will become hungry with a hunger no image, person, or deed can still."   John O' Donahue