Dr Phil McGraw

Food is a coping mechanism; people are afraid of giving it up because then they’ll feel confused and lost.

You are only as happy as your saddest child.

I’ve talked to so many people, men and women alike, that get overweight and their self-esteem just goes in the tank. They think they’re judged. They think they’re unattractive.

You cannot be who and what you are unless you have a lifestyle, both internally and externally, that is designed to support that definition of self.

Be your authentic self. Your authentic self is who you are when you have no fear of judgment, or before the world starts pushing you around and telling you who you’re supposed to be. Your fictional self is who you are when you have a social mask on to please everyone else. Give yourself permission to be your authentic self.

When you allow a person’s words to upset you, you’re giving away your power.

The menu is not the meal.

I think you’re running into a lot of trouble if your idea of foreplay is, ‘Brace yourself honey, here I come!’

I’d never met a woman I considered as intelligent as me. That sounds bigheaded, but every woman I met was either a dolly-chick, or a sort of screwed-up intellectual chick. And of course, in the field I was in, I didn’t meet many intellectual people anyway. I always had this dream of meeting an artist, an artist girl who would be like me. And I thought it was a myth, but then I met Yoko and that was it.

Man is the only animal that blushes – or needs to.

The ‘B’ stands for whatever, depending on the day…beautiful or bully

There is no chance, no destiny, no fate, that can hinder or control the firm resolve of a determined soul.

There is no mistake in nature.

I do not believe that material accumulation is the whole of success, and on the other hand I do not believe that true success ever excludes a sufficient possession of wealth-but wealth as a means, not as an end.

We live in an era of tremendous facts. And the facts are facts. They are also unpleasant facts, which does not decrease their factual percentage one bit. Our job is to understand them, to recognize their presence, to learn if we can what they signify and not to fall into the error of minimizing facts because they have a bitter flavor.

You almost never get the pleasure of seeing that you won the argument in real time. People just don’t like to publicly change their minds. They change their minds in private.

The love we were promised in fairy tales was never something for us to find. It has always been something for us to create.

The more you know, the more you realise how much you don’t know — the less you know, the more you think you know.

Despite everybody who has been born and has died, the world has just gone on. I mean, look at Napoleon – but we went right on. Look at Harpo Marx –the world went around, it didn’t stop for a second. It’s sad but true. John Kennedy, right?

I’m beginning to understand myself. But it would have been great to be able to understand myself when I was 20 rather than when I was 82.

When I read about the evils of drinking, I gave up reading.