I must talk, and you must listen, for we are engaged here in the most important pursuit in history: the search for meaning. What is the nature of being a person? What is the best way to go about being a person? How did we come to be, and what will be...
Rich people show their appreciation through favors. When everyone you know has more money than they know what to do with, money stops being a useful transactional tool. So instead you offer favors. Deals. Quid pro quos. Things that involve personal i...
Statements of fact are after all statements, which presumes a number of questionable judgements: that those statements are worth making, perhaps more worth making than certain others, that I am the sort of person entitled to make them and perhaps abl...
Love demands freedom. It always has, and it always will. We are free to resist, reject, and rebel against God's ways for us. We can have all the hell we want.
Cancer, he’d said near the end, is the great equalizer. It doesn’t care who you are or what kind of salary you make. It doesn’t give one damn if you are a good person or a bad one. It is the ultimate villain because it’s not capable of mercy....
I'm not sure what a good person is, exactly. On the one hand, it could be someone who always play by the rules. But someone can follow the rules and still be a real jerk, you know? In fact, some of the biggest idiots I know are people who follow the ...
Then, one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life...you give them a piece of you. They don't ask for it. They do something dumb one day like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn't your own a...
I've said that he and I had been crazy for each other. But maybe my ex and I were not crazy for each other. Maybe we were sane for each other, as if our desire was almost not even personal - it was personal, but that hardly mattered, since there seem...
Unhappiness can be like a virus spreading from one person, to the next person, to the next one and so on. When someone is mean or rude to you, do not let their unhappiness infect your own life. If you are the unhappy one, please quarantine yourself s...
But, I believe," I continue, "I know what true love is - or what it should be." "What should it be?" Tristan asks, his voice soft now. "It should be a friendship and truly knowing who a person is, knowing his flaws and hopes and strengths and fears, ...
We have between 60,000- and 80,000 thoughts a day. That’s a thought every 1.2 seconds…but we are not our thoughts – we have thoughts. Just like a cell phone is not our texts…it receives texts but they are not the phone. You have thoughts but ...
Other people are, as a rule, so immaterial to us that, when we have entrusted to any one of them the power to cause so much suffering or happiness to ourselves, that person seems at once to belong to a different universe, is surrounded with poetry, m...
Things you'd never even seen with Finn could remind you of him, because he was the one person you'd want to show. "Look at that," you'd want to say, because you knew he would find a way to think it was wonderful. To make you feel like the most observ...
I scan the room for objects to hit her with. I want to hammer over the head with something, or stab her. I don’t know what stops me, but I guess that’s the difference between a good person and a murderer. The murderer doesn’t stop themselves, b...
The most important therapeutic capacity is the ability to be present with an open heart and to be grounded in our inner being,in our essence and authentic self, in the meditative quality within, through which we can meet another person. It is to meet...
One day I said to them, Where is the God you worship? They said he was like Chukwu, that he was in the sky. I asked then, Who is the person that was killed, the person that hangs on the wood outside the mission? They said he was the son, but that the...
One finds the same basic mythological themes in all the religions of the world, from the most primitive to the most sophisticated, from the North American plains to European forests to Polynesian atolls. The imagery of myth is a language, a lingua fr...
Every successful business (1) creates or provides something of value that (2) other people want or need (3) at a price they're willing to pay, in a way that (4) satisfies the purchaser's needs and expectations and (5) provides the business sufficient...
Every man of character will have that character questioned. Every man of honor and courage will be faced with unjust criticism, but never forget that unjust criticism has no impact whatsoever upon the truth. And the only sure way to avoid criticism i...
Hate is a terrible thing. It's a wasteful, stupid emotion. You can hate someone with all your heart, but it'll never do them a bit of harm. The only person it hurts is you. You can spend your days hating, letting it eat away at you, and the person yo...
There are no lessons to be learned from the past. This is the first thing I learned from it. There is nothing back then that there isn't here now. There is nothing here now - nothing that matters - that wasn't back then. What matters. Are you a good ...