Dr Phil McGraw

As parents we’re not nearly as computer literate as our children are.

How often, for example, have you said or heard someone else say, “All I really want in this life is to be happy”? It sounds like a commonsense answer, but as a life goal, it is destined for failure. My dog, Barkley, wants to be happy. Does that mean that the two of you want the same things? I don’t think so. I’ll bet everything I own that you and Barkley define happiness very differently. So unless you’re willing to settle for someone scratching your belly and letting you sleep under the coffee table, you might want to be a little more precise about what you as a unique individual really want.

We teach people how to treat us.

I don’t substitute anybody else’s judgment for my own.

Success means different things in different parts of my life, but overall if I have to define ultimately what success means – the bottom line – then for me it’s if the family is healthy and happy.

Life experiences, mental illness, drugs, greed, environment, and poor role-modeling can all forge damaged people and can generate a darkness, an exploitiveness, in the way they approach life. Whatever their genesis, there are people in your life (and mine) who will hurt you if you let them.

Should a man quit at 40 he is failure-Retire at that age is sorry failure.

Anything is better than lies and deceit!

Always pack your uniform on top.

Life’s three best teachers: heartbreak, empty pocket, failures.

It takes only one drink to get me drunk. The trouble is, I can’t remember if it’s the thirteenth or the fourteenth.

There are people who strictly deprive themselves of each and every eatable, drinkable, and smokable which has in any way acquired a shady reputation. They pay this price for health. And health is all they get for it. How strange it is. It is like paying out your whole fortune for a cow that has gone dry.

We’ll love you just the way you are if you’re perfect.

There are some sick people in this world.

It was like being in the eye of a hurricane. You’d wake up in a concert and think, Wow, how did I get here?

If you can’t be a good example, then you’ll just have to be a horrible warning.

It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.

I don’t write letters anymore.

To me, you’ll always be the rising suns, the sinking moons, and all the stars that come between the sound of rain and river stones, the warmth of my sheets, the ache in my bones.

Being both soft and strong is a combination very few have mastered.

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.