Virginia Satir Quotes

If you live your life as a hostage to everybody else's decision, you either have to live a very narrow life, or you have to spend a lot of time in pain.

I think that is the ultimate cowardice, when someone makes your choices for you in an institutional way. And you just say, "Well, I have no other option."

I don't like to be told what to do at all. That's unfortunate because a lot of people come up with good ideas and can direct you.

You define your own life. Don't let other people write your script.

The trouble is if you don’t spend your life yourself, other people spend it for you.

Up to now I've done everything I've wanted to do the way I wanted to do myself.

I very much want to do things my way, and I want to control the result.

Once you feel like you're being dictated by other people's expectations, it usually backfires.

I tell myself that if I start to listen to these people and start to let them decide how I should behave and what I should do, then this is not my life - it's theirs.

I try and do whatever I want with my free time. I think having control of what you do is really important.

I don't worry about other people, and I don't let them influence me too much. I try to find out what I want to do and not what other people want me to do.

I see too many children who have their lives decided for them from the moment they are born. I want to give them the power to decide their own lives.

Autonomy is the whole thing; it's what unhappy people are missing. They have given the power to run their lives to other people.

She is free to do what she wants, and free not to do it.

I did not want to be coming off the stage at the mercy of what somebody else told me I did.

I´m not a wandering slave, I am a woman of choice

Sometimes people think of actors as marionettes - everybody else makes the decisions for us - and, you know, really, making this decision [of which roles to take] is the only thing you lay claim to.

The right to figure things out for yourself is the only true freedom everyone shares. Go use it.

Man belongs wherever he wants to go - and he'll do plenty well when he gets there.

However, he also trusted me to make my own decisions. Contradicting me or telling me what to do wasn't in his nature - even though he secretly may have wanted to.

I wish my life and decisions to depend upon myself, not on external forces of whatever kind. I wish to be the instrument of my own, not other men's, acts of will. I wish to be the subject, not an object...I wish to be somebody, not nobody; a doer - deciding, not being decided for, slef-directed and not acted upon by external nature or by other men as if I were a thing, or an animal, or a slave incapable of playing a human role, that is, of conceiving goals and policies of my own and realizing them.

I hate being told what to do! Especially by myself!

To die at the command of another is to die twice.

If you spend your life trying to please people or letting them control you, you may make them happy, but you'll miss your destiny.

Freedom begins the moment you realize someone else has been writing your story and it's time you took the pen from his hand and started writing it yourself.