Quotes by Werner Erhard

One creates from nothing.  If you try to create from something you're just changing something.  So in order to create something you first have to be able to create nothing.

In life, understanding is the booby prize.

If you could really accept that you weren't ok you, could stop proving you were ok. If you could stop proving that you were ok you could get that it was ok not to be ok. If you could get that it was ok not to be ok you could get that you were ok the way you are. You're ok, get it?

When you've said all of the bad things and all of the good things you haven't been saying, you will find that what you've really been withholding is, "I love you." You don't have to go looking for love when it is where you come from.

“The problems we have now in communities and societies are going to be resolved only when we are brought together by a common sense that each of us is a visionary. Each of us must come to the realization that we can function and live at the level of vision rather than following some great leader’s vision. Instead of looking for a great leader, we are in an era where each of us needs to find the great leader in ourselves.” - Werner Erhard

“The problems we have now in communities and societies are going to be resolved only when we are brought together by a common sense that each of us is a visionary. Each of us must come to the realization that we can function and live at the level of vision rather than following some great leader’s vision. Instead of looking for a great leader, we are in an era where each of us needs to find the great leader in ourselves.” - Werner Erhard

Man keeps looking for a truth that fits his reality. Given our reality, the truth doesn't fit. If you experience it, it's the truth. The same thing believed is a lie. In life, understanding is the booby prize.

Your life works to the degree you keep your agreements.

Life is like a stand you take for someone or something - a stand you take FOR someone, towards someone, rather than it being an internal state which you represent with the word "love."  If that were true, if just that little bit were true, the distance between you and the mastery of love would be very short.  You and I could bring forth the phenomenon of love by virtue of a declaration, "I love you," where the declaration was a stand, a commitment and we could see that that was not some "thing" called love, but an opening, a possibility, a clearing in which our
experiences could show up as an expression of the declaration, of the stand, of the commitment, of the context.  If all that were really possible, then the distance between us and mastering love is pretty short.  You see, what shows up in a stand validates the stand.  If a doubt shows up in the space of something for which you stand, it shows up as an expression of the stand, that is to say it shows up for you as something to handle out of your stand, not as something contrary to that for which you stand.   So if love in our relationships was a clearing in which life became present, even what we ordinarily think of as a negative circumstance, in a clearing created by a declaration of love, where the declaration is something for which you stand, even a so-called negative circumstance does not show up in opposition to that for which you stand, but shows up as something to be handled within the stand.  

I know you're sitting there saying "gee i wish it were that easy" and I'm saying it might be something very close to that easy...just like that.   And I'm inviting you into this domain of possibility where you don't know the answers, where relationship and love exist like a question.   I know you think that love is a set of emotions and moods and thoughts and attitudes and outlooks and feelings. And I'm inviting you to consider the possibility that that simply is one interpretation not one with which you are stuck. that you do not need to live the rest of your life without love when you don't have that set of feelings which you have heretofore described as love. ...that it might be possible to bring love into your life, like a creation, like something for which you could be responsible, like something you could bring forth on your our own as a matter of declaration and as a matter of taking a stand. and that you could bring love into those circumstance in your life when the relationships are most difficult, most problematic.  And you could do it as a simple act of being where being is that for which you are willing to stand. and that the stand comes forth in a declaration and exists behind the declaration as a stand.

Until you know that who you are is empty and meaningless, you don't know anything.