The feeling of awed wonder that science can give us is one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable. It is a deep aesthetic passion to rank with the finest that music and poetry can deliver. It is truly one of the things that m...
With discipline, you are able to maintain a higher tolerance for frustration, obstacles and negative emotions. Self-discipline allows you to obtain better health, better finances and a good work ethic, and it allows you to reach your most difficult g...
I have always believed in the power of collaboration. Early on in my professional career, I realized that you can't develop all the competencies you need fast enough on your own. Furthermore, if you don't collaborate, your ideas will be limited to yo...
And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams...
We appealed to the conscience of the world. The world has no conscience. We have no one but ourselves." The fight. The struggle. The historic destiny. The return of the people. The cause: life therefore having a meaning and shape that eludes the rest...
Adventure is about what we do; not what we plan, strategize or dream about. Adventure begins with “what ifs” and “why nots.” “What if I were to step out to chase that dream? Why not take the first steps and see what happens? When we step th...
The artist and the mother are vehicles, not originators. They don't create the new life, they only bear it. This is why birth is such a humbling experience. The new mom weeps in awe at the little miracle in her arms. She knows it came out of her but ...
Each memory was brought to life before me and within me. I could not avoid them. Neither could I rationalize, explain away. I could only re-experience with total cognizance, unprotected by pretense. Self delusion was impossible, truth exposed in this...
I’m much better at working out ideas in action than I am in theorizing about it and then transferring my thinking to action. I don’t work that way. I work with tentative ideas and I experiment and then with that experimentation in action, I final...
…there are simply no words that would be worthy of describing their encounter. And if any narrator ever tries to come up with some details, it would be only to arouse the readers’ lust, and would not do justice to what happened that night between...
And yet, as she sits there with him on the window seat, with his strong arms around her, she knows that if she can survive crying, then there are other things she can survive too. And that if some things are lost to her forever, there are others that...
In my experience, when a woman's cruelty is combined with love and devotion, it is almost always without exception an act performed not out of treachery, but as a painful self-sacrifice for the good of her beloved, to obtain for him a future bounty w...
If we go looking for a friend, we’ll find many locked doors. It can be a lonely and often fruitless search. Sometimes it feels like no matter how hard we knock there’s not a single person to be found for true friendship. But... when we go out to ...
Buddha is someone with a very advanced self-concept. His self-esteem is perfect; he has gone beyond doubt; he knows, and he is confident of his knowledge; he expresses himself with conviction. When the Buddha talks of himself in the first person he d...
The happiness of being envied is glamour. Being envied is a solitary form of reassurance. It depends precisely upon not sharing your experience with those who envy you. You are observed with interest but you do not observe with interest - if you do, ...
The desire to live life to its fullest, to acquire more knowledge, to abandon the economic treadmill, are all typical reactions to these experiences in altered states of consciousness. The previous fear of death is typically quelled. If the individua...
Ritualised child sexual abuse is about abuse of power, control and secrecy. Ten years ago many people found it difficult to believe that fathers actually raped their children, yet survivors of such abuses spoke out and eventually began to be listened...
Las Vegas suggests that the thirst for places, for cities and gardens and wilderness, is unslaked, that people will still seek out the experience of wandering about in the open air to examine the architecture, the spectacles, and the stuff for sale, ...
Information wants to be free.' So goes the saying. Stewart Brand, the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, seems to have said it first. I say that information doesn't deserve to be free. Cybernetic totalists love to think of the stuff as if it were al...
You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, 'I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.' You must do the thing yo...
I had always insisted that a good education was a synthesis of book learning and involvement in social action, that each enriched the other. I wanted my students to know that the accumulation of knowledge, while fascinating in itself, is not sufficie...
