Daily Inspiration Quote by Eric Butterworth

Butterworth is trying to pry identity loose from its most seductive impostor: the voice in your head. The first sentence, "I am not what I think", lands like a spiritual brake-check. It denies the modern reflex to treat every thought as a confession of the self. Anxiety, intrusive images, petty jealousies, even grandiose fantasies: they feel intimate, so we assume they are us. Butterworth’s intent is to interrupt that automatic merger and create a gap where choice and responsibility can exist.

Then he pivots: "I am thinking what I think". The repetition is the point. It sounds tautological until you hear the shift in agency. The self isn’t the content of thought; the self is the activity, the witness, the ongoing verb. In a mid-20th-century self-help and New Thought milieu where Butterworth worked, this is a tactical reframe: you can’t always control what appears in consciousness, but you can relate to it differently. He’s training readers to move from identification ("this fear is me") to observation ("fear is happening; I’m aware of it").

Subtext: accountability without self-condemnation. If thoughts are not your essence, you don’t have to be flattened by them. If you are the thinker, not the thought, you’re also on the hook for what you rehearse, endorse, and build a life around. The quote’s spare, almost stuttering symmetry mirrors the practice it advocates: catch the thought, step back, re-own the mind as a process, not a verdict.