We acquire both the language and religious concepts from our immediate culture – at the same time. A child cannot discriminate between useful survival information and the emotional and psychological manipulations of religion. Once infected, these i...
She recalled him as a forceful and witty speaker with a ready repartee and a penetrating voice. He had once, for example, put down a spokesman for the pesticide industry with a remark that people still quoted at parties: "And I presume on the eighth ...
He's going to jail. He can't see. He can't hear. He can't take a leak that lasts under fifteen minutes. But he has an erection and all the other problems are small change. Next time around I'm coming back as a man. Priorities are clearly defined. Lif...
What we view as God’s absence or lack of quickness to change our circumstances or fix our problems is really God waiting for the proper time to act on our behalf, while simultaneously waiting for us to acknowledge our need for rescue.
A dim vastness is spread before our souls; the perceptions of our mind are as obscure as those of our vision... But alas! when we have attained our object, when the distant 'there' becomes the present 'here,' all is changed; we are as poor and circum...
Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and stre...
All those adorable towheaded kids in the promotional film are going to turn thirteen. Once a family member hits puberty, odds are that everybody is not going to have the same ideals. Unless everybody gets together and agrees that the new ideals invol...
They say though that we do more to avoid pain than we do to gain pleasure. So it is when the pain becomes too much that we finally find the courage to make changes.
That was the thing. You just never knew. Forever was so many different things. It was always changing; it was what everything was really about. It was twenty minutes, or a hundred years, or just this instant, or any instant I wished would last and la...
So as a seventh grader, no, you weren't friends with people you didn't like. But sometimes you also weren't friends with people you did like, which was complicated, and which didn't make any sense if you tried to explain it. Sometimes things just cha...
Where moments before the bright morning sun flickered through the branches of the huge oak trees surrounding the property, every-thing in a ten yard radius immediately went pitch dark. The air, already a chilly fifty degrees, dropped past freezing in...
The irony of what we define as a mistake can and will sometimes return to you as a redefined destiny that life sends your way without any of your own free will and choice in what happens. It just happens. Something in me changed in that one tell-tale...
Let this story be an inspiration when dealing with the weak-minded who share your communal housing blocks and the selfish who use all the soap in your group bathing wells. Know that change is achievable and that happy endings do come, for this story ...
No genuine change in society ever occurs without the mass public getting behind a cause. The good guys in government are counting on enough of us common people waking up and demanding more rights and greater freedoms.
Politicians would be well advised not to hold their breath for youth to engage in politics any time soon. Today’s youth are the first generation to have realized for real change to occur, it must happen on an individual level rather than at an admi...
Most of all, I'll remind them each morning that we make a choice to bring positivity or negativity into the world, and that within every single person where lies an extraordinary story waiting to unfold.
In moments of uncertainty, when you must chose between two paths, allowing yourself to be overcome by either the fear of failure or the dimly lit light of possibility, immerse yourself in the life you would be most proud to live.
Life would go out in a 'fraction of a second' (that was the phrase), but all night he had been realizing that time depends on clocks and the passage of light. There were no clocks and the light wouldn't change. Nobody really knew how long a second of...
There's something very... I don't know; primitive, perhaps, about you, Gurgeh. You've never changed sex, have you?' He shook his head. 'Or slept with a man?' Another shake. 'I thought so,' Yay said. 'You're strange, Gurgeh.' She drained her glass.
I think the greatest weakness in the church today is that almost no one believes that God invests His power in the Bible. Everyone is looking for power in a program, in a methodology, in a technique, in anything and everything but that in which God h...
Considering that we live in an era of evolutionary everything---evolutionary biology, evolutionary medicine, evolutionary ecology, evolutionary psychology, evolutionary economics, evolutionary computing---it was surprising how rarely people thought i...