Internal Dialogue Quotes

It isn't what you have, or who you are, or where you are, or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy. It is what you think about.

The components of anxiety, stress, fear, and anger do not exist independently of you in the world. They simply do not exist in the physical world, even though we talk about them as if they do.

It isn't what happens to us that causes us to suffer; it's what we say to ourselves about what happens.

I'm probably my biggest critic. There's nothing anyone can ask of me that I haven't already asked of myself.

Whenever the internal dialogue stops, the world collapses, and extraordinary facets of ourselves surface, as though they had been kept heavily guarded by our words.

we become the stories we tell ourselves

Your life is a reflection of how you think

I always have these little internal monologues. You'll get used to them.

What we do in life is determined by how we communicate to ourselves. In the modern world, the quality of life is the quality of communication.

I like hearing myself talk. It is one of my greatest pleasures. I often have long conversations all by myself. Sometimes I am so clever I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.

At that point I asked myself: How is it that she is not amazed at herself, that she keeps her lips closed and makes no such remark?

'Sally' is just a song that I wrote talking to my alter ego. When I write, I don't really consciously say, 'This is what I've been going through in my life, and I'm gonna put this into words.' It's just a song that I kinda went in and did. Then, listening back to it, I realized, 'I'm talking to myself.'

The actual life of a thought lasts only until it reaches the point of speech...As soon as our thinking has found words it ceases to be sincere...When it begins to exist in others it ceases to live in us, just as the child severs itself from its mother when it enters into its own existence.

Somebody asked me the other day, 'What do you love the most about the show?' I said, 'The conversations that I have with my father in my head while I'm playing.' If I do something pretty good... I mean, I'm playing the gig and I'm saying in my head, 'Hey, check that one out, dad.'

Every one of us is the sum total of his own thoughts

Half the time you think your thinking you’re actually listening

The most important conversations, briefings, meeting, and lectures you will ever have will be those you hold with yourself in the privacy of your own mind.

Observe yourself as you go through a typical day. Stuff happens to you. As it does, you immediately judge it and label it. Dozens of times. Hundreds of times. So often that you no longer recognize that you're doing it. It is a deep-seated habit.

But you can't get away from yourself. You can't decide not to see yourself anymore. You can't decide to turn off the noise in your head.

Self-talk, for me, has been the biggest thing in my life. A lot of us have a dialogue that is crap. It's a crappy dialogue. We live in a world right now that is very external. Everything is very on the surface. Superficial. Everything. And what we're telling ourselves is what we see on TV.

While most people are conditioned to see the body as a biological machine, you can begin to view it as a field of energy, transformation, and intelligence that is constantly renewing itself. Begin to notice both your internal dialogue and how you speak about your body and aging.

For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he.

If people stopped looking on their emotions as ethereal, almost inhuman processes, and realistically viewed them as being largely composed of perceptions, thoughts, evaluations, and internalized sentences, they would find it quite possible to work calmly and concertedly at changing them.

When I'm sifting the compost seed or pruning, I argue over issues in my head; I talk to myself.