And even though people like to furrow their brow like they suspect you're not being honest about yourself, the truth is that they worry that you're not serving their idea of you.
We must remember that all stations are as much about life as they are obviously about death. All is redeemed. All is grist for transformation and glory.
Strange, how death had a way of turning a table upside down in an instant. It swept away all the dust that covered treasures, blew the fog from one’s view, knocked away facades.
The three jewels of Tao: compassion, moderation, and humility. Balthasar said compassion leads to courage, moderation leads to generosity, and humility leads to leadership.
If there was anything I learned from John the Baptist, it was that the sooner you confess a mistake, the quicker you can get on to making new and better mistakes.
We live in a culture of complaint because everyone is always looking for things to complain about. It's all tied in with the desire to blame others for misfortunes and to get some form of compensation into the bargain.
Well, you finally got me," Helen had whispered to him, tearfully, but Garp had sprawled there, on his back on the wrestling mat, wondering who had gotten whom.
In times of stress, the best thing we can do for each other is to listen with our ears and our hearts and to be assured that our questions are just as important as our answers.
The man is distinguished from the youth by the fact that he takes the world as it is, instead of everywhere fancying it amiss and wanting to improve it, i.e. model it after his ideal; in him the view that one must deal with the world according to his...
Children live in the only successful Marxist state ever created: the family. 'From each according to his ability, to each according to his need' is the family's practice as well as its theory. Even with today's scattershot patterns of marriage and pa...
Ah, yes. That. The sin of being happy or excited. According to my father, we must guard carefully against such things. According to my father, these emotions are the equivalent of dancing on out fifth-floor window ledge. Clearly inviting a nasty fall...
We [Americans] became a nation of java junkies, wired from dawn to dusk intent on running faster, getting richer, dancing harder, playing longer and getting higher than anybody else.
What have I always believed? That on the whole, and by and large, if a man lived properly, not according to what any priests said, but according to what seemed decent and honest inside, then it would, at the end, more or less, turn out all right.
How do you plan a rebirth? I'm not sure you do. You just stand in the darkness until you can't endure it any long, and then you move forward until you're standing in the light.
Every time a new record started, people exhaled with pleasure, or their bodies moved automatically. I really started getting high off of the euphoric exclamations. Every record I put on was like a baptism.
The happy life is thought to be one of excellence; now an excellent life requires exertion, and does not consist in amusement. If Eudaimonia, or happiness, is activity in accordance with excellence, it is reasonable that it should be in accordance wi...
Any serious reading of the Bible means personal involvement in it, not symbol mental agreement with abstract propositions. And involvement is dangerous, because it leaves one open to unforeseen conclusions.
A prophet is one who sees what is happening and being done in the present that they can tell us what will happen to us if we do not change now, immediately, turning from our present course.
Whenever we use our religion, as individuals, or as groups within the church, to act in tandem with political and economic groups that arrest the voice of truth or destroy others, then we are Judas.
... but to remain historically accurate, I would have had to leave out an important question that I felt needed to be addressed, which is, 'What if Jesus had known kung fu?
You know what? You know what? You know what?' I was waving my finger under her nose. 'You scratched the Son of God. That's your ass, that's what.
