Our ability to look back on the past, our need or desire to make sense of it, is both a blessing and a curse; and our inability to see into the future with any degree of accuracy is, simultaneously, the thing that saves us and the thing that condemns...
The good news is that God gave us imaginations because he wanted us to take a tour into our future, see what’s there for us and then we prepare to relocate into it. Our destiny resides in our imaginations!
It is only when our fate hangs in the balance, when our very life depends on something, that we see whether or not we trust that the rope to which we are clinging will support us. If we do not, then we let of of the ledge and swing on it with our ful...
How remarkable we are in our ability to hide things from ourselves - our conscious minds only a small portion of our actual minds, jellyfish floating on a vast dark sea of knowing and deciding.
In a sense, he thought, all we consist of is memories. Our personalities are constructed from memories, our lives are organized around memories, our cultures are built upon the foundation of shared memories that we call history and science.
But let us be sure of something. We are not sheep. This government is ours, and it is meant to serve our best interests. And if it has grown into something it shouldn't be, and shucked off the rules of the Constitution it was based on, then it is our...
No matter our talent, we all know in the midnight of our souls that 90 percent of what we do is less than our best.
We've got to make change our national pastime and hold protests more regularly than weekend parties.
It is easy for us to criticize the prejudices of our grandfathers, from which our fathers freed themselves. It is more difficult to distance ourselves from our own beliefs so that we can dispassionately search for prejudices among them.
We can ignore even pleasure. But pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.
The great art of life is to moderate our passions. Objects of affection are like other belongings. We must love them enough to enrich our lives while we have them, not enough to impoverish our lives when they are gone.
One way to handle the discrepancy between our beliefs and our sinful inclinations is to repent, pray for grace and forgiveness, and struggle on in the belief that God will forge a greater harmony for us out of our battle with sin. That is the Christi...
Our whole lives, it was like we were always trying so hard to be perfect - for our families and our friends, for each other - when the funny thing was, we didn't have to. In the end, we were better than that.
Whenever we suffer — no matter what the severity of our suffering is — we have the ability to find meaning in the situation.
…The more enormous our wealth, the more extensive our fears, all our possessions are paled up with new edicts every day, and hung round with gibbets to scare every invader.
Through our reading we can travel to other times and other places, into other peoples minds and hearts and souls: it is a transcendent experience.
If God were not only to hear our prayers, as he does ever and always, but to answer them as we want them answered, he would not be God our Saviour but the ministering genius of our destruction.
When clouds will become heavier than the land in us led our entire life by the steps of our Destiny, we will understand that not their moments’ rain has darkened the sun of our life, but the failure to be ourselves.
Deep down in all of us there is a tendency to want to prove ourselves, to base our worth on what we do.
Pessimism becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy; it reproduces itself by crippling our willingness to act.
If our limbic system betrays our true intentions, and it’s beyond our conscious control, then only a fool would consider lying a wise course of action. Politicians are full of such wisdom.
