Between stimulus, or what happens to us or has ever happened to us, and our response, lies our power and freedom to choose. In those choices lie our growth and happiness.
Some people are like a thermometer. If their environment is negative, they are negative. If bad things happen, they are sad. If good things happen, they are happy. They are simply a product of their environment. Successful people, on the other hand, ...
But the summer had been a very happy one, too -- a time of glad living with summer suns and skies, a time of keen delight in wholesome things; a time of renewing and deepening of old friendships; a time in which she had learned to live more nobly, to...
It is in dialogue with pain that many beautiful things acquire their value. Acquaintance with grief turns out to be one of the more unusual prerequisites of architectural appreciation. We might, quite aside from all other requirements, need to be a l...
Bad architecture is in the end as much a failure of psychology as of design. It is an example expressed through materials of the same tendencies which in other domains will lead us to marry the wrong people, choose inappropriate jobs and book unsucce...
Heroes do not dwell in a time of peace; heroes are hardened in a kiln against the sorrows. Their troubles sharpen the blade and make it gleaming. The glint becomes a brightness that is raised high on a hill, allowing women and men to see beyond thems...
The breeze carried the music into the distant country plains, past the bullet trains, across the majestic cornfields and the Christmas tree farms. The music swept past the Georgia orange trees, the droning honeybees, and the shining seas of the Atlan...
It may well be that an analysis of figures would reveal a law - the duration of a marriage is inversely proportional to the cost of the wedding. Or, to put it another way, any union celebrated with personalized toasting flutes is doomed.
Being constantly the hub of a network of potential interruptions provides the excitement and importance of crisis management. As well as the false sense of efficiency in multitasking, there is the false sense of urgency in multi-interrupt processing.
and it was the pretending that might explain how she could smile so brightly while her mind felt nothing - as if, at these times, there existed a disconnection between outer and inner, a shutting off, and the key to her happiness lay in warding off p...
I’m happy to see that we’re stopping to eat some dinner, since we didn’t actually eat lunch today. Instead we just argued, I pouted, slapped him, bojo’d him, and then I came like a freight train. I’ve had a very busy day.
When you're used to having nothing, nothing becomes your everything, and you never really want for anything. But it's a double-edged sword, because there's the danger of becoming complacent, becoming too happy with that nothing, because you've never ...
Then she would wander through fields, over simple, poor land, looking carefully and keenly all round her, still getting used to being alive in the world, and feeling glad that everything in it was right for her — for her body, her heart, and her fr...
Like most complicated things where it's easy to get derailed, their marriage was successful because they mastered the basics. From that mastery they could weather anything.
You know, kid, ethics isn't about choosing between right and wrong; it's about choosing between grey and grey. It's about choosing between two equally desirable but mutually exclusive courses of action. Freedom or security? Courage or comfort? Self-e...
Human nature, at its best, had always been based on a deep heroic restlessness, on wanting something--something else, something more, whether it be true love or a glimpse just beyond the horizon. It was the promise of happiness, not the attainment of...
Few of us would regret the years it takes to complete an education or master a crucial skill. So why complain about the perseverance needed to become a well-balanced and truly compassionate human being?
She was considered timid and morose. Only in the country, her skin tanned by the sun and her belly full of ripe fruit, running through the fields with Pedro Tercero, was she smiling and happy. Her mother said that that was the real Blanca, and that t...
But without deeper reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people--first of all for those upon whose smiles and well-being our own happiness is wholly dependent, and then for the many, unknown to us, to whose destinies we are b...
Now I understand why women want to have children - it's simply the urge to create happiness for yourself, somehow to fill the oppressive, unbearable emptiness in your soul.
See, I’m a great believer in the power of negative thought. And in an age of affirmation, of self-help and self-love, of the rebirth of wide-eyed idealism and the power of positive thinking — I’m happy to be a champion of skepticism and doubt. ...
