To you, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism look very different, but to me they look the same. Many of you would say that something like Buddhism doesn't even belong on the list, since it doesn't link salvation to divine worship, but...
Is there some lesson on how to be friends? I think what it means is that central to living a life that is good is a life that's forgiving. We're creatures of contact regardless of whether we kiss or we wound. Still, we must come together. Though it m...
I think politics is deadly to write about, frankly. If you have a political agenda and you set out to write a novel to prove that, say, capitalism should crumble, then it's going to be a really bad novel. Very few people have been able to deal with p...
Cultivate the understanding that the self is not really an independently existing entity, and begin to view self instead in terms of it's dependent relation to others. Although it is difficult to say that merely reflecting on this will produce a prof...
It’s even more awkward when we’re face to face with people. It used to be exciting to make plans with friends because you could sit and catch up and talk about what’s been going on in your lives. Now when you see someone there’s nothing left ...
Disappointment Can do a couple things. It can drop you into a giant sucking sinkhole of depression, a place you have to fight to climb out of. Or it can trigger an epic mania to overcome the odds and transform failure into success. Say you swing as h...
Progress had not invaded, science had not enlightened, the little hamlet of Pieuvrot, in Brittany. They were a simple, ignorant, superstitious set who lived there, and the luxuries of civilization were known to them as little as its learning. They to...
Her magic formula for dealing with children is ignoring all faults and accenting tiny virtues. She says, "Instead of telling Tommy day in and day out that he is the naughtiest boy in the United States of America, which could very well be true, take a...
NEW RULE: 'Kidiots' Leave the children behind. At least until they learn something. A new study has shown that half of American high schools agree that newspapers should only be able to publish government-approved material. Almost one out of five sai...
We don't think of ourselves as 'unforgiving' or 'bitter'- those words imply that we are somehow personally responsible. We prefer to talk about how deeply we have been 'hurt', implying that we are merely helpless victims. Are those who have been deep...
Even though we don't know which companies the NSA has compromised – or by what means – knowing that they could have compromised any of them is enough to make us mistrustful of all of them. This is going to make it hard for large companies like Go...
Contention with all its variations is one of the most destructive forces in home and society. Lying and stealing are only extensions of basic problems in the home environment. Some psychologists of the day would label such malfunctions as 'normal.' '...
Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, prec...
If and when all the laws governing physical phenomena are finally discovered, and all the empirical constants occurring in these laws are finally expressed through the four independent basic constants, we will be able to say that physical science has...
What I am suggesting is that each of us turn from the negativism that permeates our society and look for the remarkable good among those with whom we associate, that we speak of one another’s virtues more than we speak of one another’s faults, th...
I will say that my philosophy as a writer, since the very start of my career, has been one of “show, don’t tell.” Whatever might be happening in my books, I try to put the reader into the middle of it, rather than summarizing the action. That r...
The majority of pacifists either belong to obscure religious sects or are simply humanitarians who object to taking life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that point. But there is a minority of intellectual pacifists, whose real though u...
Night was falling. Birds were singing. Birds were, it occurred to me to say, enacting a frantic celebration of day's end. They were manifesting as the earth's bright-colored nerve endings, the sun's descent urging them into activity, filling them ind...
We are all connected -- I believed it then and believe it still now -- at least in an energetic sense. And who’s to say this energy is not real? We can’t see gravity, either, yet we don’t deny it. We can’t see magnetism, yet we don’t questi...
And some day there will be nothing left of everything that has twisted my life and grieved it and filled me so often with such anguish. Some day, with the last exhaustion, peace will come and the motherly earth will gather me back home. It won't be t...
Well, I definitely advise anyone who wants to write, write. Don’t let anyone tell you that you shouldn’t. Don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t. Because a lot of people can be very discouraging to people who say they want to be a professio...
