We should fix ourselves firmly in the presence of God by conversing all the time with Him...we should feed our soul with a lofty conception of God and from that derive great joy in being his. We should put life in our faith. We should give ourselves ...
The American story has never been about things coming easy. It has been about rising to the moment when the moment is hard. About rejecting panicked division for purposeful unity. About seeing a mountaintop from the deepest valley. That is why we rem...
I have lived in the pursuit of a vision, both personal and social. Personal: to care for what is noble, for what is beautiful, for what is gentle; to allow moments of insight to give wisdom at more mundane times. Social: to see in imagination the soc...
The decision to be positive is not one that disregards or belittles the sadness that exists. It is rather a conscious choice to focus on the good and to cultivate happiness--genuine happiness. Happiness is not a limited resource. And when we devote o...
Awareness is our true self; it’s what we are. So we don’t have to try to develop awareness; we simply need to notice how we block awareness, with our thoughts, our fantasies, our opinions, and our judgments. We’re either in awareness, which is ...
When we refuse to work with our disappointment, we break the Precepts: rather than experience the disappointment, we resort to anger, greed, gossip, criticism. Yet it's the moment of being that disappointment which is fruitful; and, if we are not wil...
Man has no individual i. But there are, instead, hundreds and thousands of separate small "i"s, very often entirely unknown to one another, never coming into contact, or, on the contrary, hostile to each other, mutually exclusive and incompatible. Ea...
How could you receive a member of the Male Sex in your bedroom, and in your dressing gown?Sir, I must request you to leave immediately1 You don't mean to tell me that's a dressing gown? interrupted Mr Carlton, a dangerous gleam in his eyes. Well, it'...
My youngest brother had a wonderful schtick from some time in high school, through to graduating medicine. He had a card in his wallet that read, ‘If I am found with amnesia, please give me the following books to read …’ And it listed half a do...
Let things take their natural course, they will generate their own momentum, that if you try to interfere with will only result in a crash. Physics knows what it is doing, it applies to everyday life, emotion, feeling, desire, and every thought in ou...
She had that look a child has only a few times in its life, when the child has bettered her betters. The expression isn't smug, though adults often take it for smugness. It's something else. Maybe relief at having confirmed through personal experienc...
This isn't to deny that there were fierce arguments, at the time and ever since, about the causes and goals of both the Civil War and the Second World War. But 1861 and 1941 each created a common national narrative (which happened to be the victors' ...
I hated [the commercial art studio] because advertising is telling lies, basically, making crap goods look terrific, and I felt I was so privileged to be an artist anyway, why was I prostituting myself on doing this sort of rubbish? So when I left th...
When young, the humans are all Imagination because Memory is so much smaller a part of their experience, so little of them is grounded in it. As they grow older, however, Memory overtakes their Imagination, outweighs it. But when they pray with ever ...
It surely can be no offence to state, that the progress of science has led to new views, and that the consequences that can be deduced from the knowledge of a hundred facts may be very different from those deducible from five. It is also possible tha...
He realized that he agonized over everything all the time, and he admitted that part of the problem in the Carter game had been his own lack of belief in his abilities. He knew the reason why he was like this, that it was the price he paid for carefu...
was a great Man with extraordinary singularities—His voice was squeaking his manner nervous He was afraid of strangers & seemed when embarrassed to articulate with difficulty—He wore the costume of our grandfathers. Was enormously rich but made n...
It's a terrible thing, I think, in life to wait until you're ready. I have this feeling now that actually no one is ever ready to do anything. There's almost no such thing as ready. There's only now. And you may as well do it now. I mean, I say that ...
Fear's a box we grow used to, convince ourselves it's all the space we need, that we like its color, its smell, its protection. Comes a time to stop hiding, stop being afraid. If we don't break free of our boxes, our spirits' shrink, we shrink in eve...
Do nothing that you would not like God to see. Say nothing you would not like God to hear. Write nothing you would not like God to read. Go no place where you would not like God to find you. Read no book of which you would not like God to say, "Show ...
One of the many things I learned at the end of that Classics corridor down which I ventured at the age of 18, in search of something I could not then define, was this, written by the Greek author Plutarch: What we achieve inwardly will change outer r...
