The universe uses every experience you have to help you grow and learn. No experience is wasted. Every choice you make and everything that happens to you because of other people’s choices become your perfect lessons. As you learn to trust this trut...
- I'm so busy doing what I must do that I don't have time for what I ought to do... and I never get a chance to do what I want to do! - Son, that's universal. The way to keep that recipe from killing you is occasionally to do what you want to do anyh...
I can hear clouds drifting across the sky! The worms beneath my feet…demand freedom from the darkness…the secret hopes of humankind…all of it trivial. I can see into other worlds…other universes…they’re calling out to me. They’ve always...
Armed with all the powers, enjoying all the wealth they owe to science, our societies are still trying to practice and to teach systems of values already destroyed at the roots by that very science. Man knows at last that he is alone in the indiffere...
If God is omnipotent and omniscient, why didn't he start the universe out in the first place so it would come out the way he wants? Why's he constantly repairing and complaining? No, there's one thing the Bible makes clear: The biblical God is a slop...
...You think if I haven't had your religious experience I can't appreciate the magnificence of your god. But it's just the opposite. I listen to you, and I think, his god is too small! One paltry planet, a few thousand years -- hardly worth the atten...
Perhaps it is weariness that causes seers not to act on what they see; for whereas the wisdom of the world can be vast, it includes the many futilities. Ideas do not have legs with which to run and hands with which to craft. They are wisps of smoke f...
The sword wears out its sheath, as it is sometimes said. That is my story. My passions have made me live, and my passions have killed me. What passions, it may be asked. Trifles, the most childish things in the world. Yet they affected me as much as ...
We are surrounded by the absurd excess of the universe. By meaningless bulk, vastness without size, power without consequence. The stubborn iteration that is present without being felt. Nothing the spirit can marry. Merely phenomenon and its physics....
Historians are not scientists. They cannot (and should not even trying to) establish universal laws of social or political "physics" with reliable predictive powers. Why? Because there is no possibility of repeating the single, multi-millennium exper...
There’s something about taking the cart back instead of leaving it in the parking lot…It’s significant…Because somebody has to take them in…And if you know that, and you do it for that one guy, you do something else. You join the world…Yo...
Besides the alternate universe offered by a book, the quiet space of a museum was my favorite place to go. My mom said I was an escapist at heart . . . that I preferred imaginary worlds to the real one. It’s true that I’ve always been able to yan...
The judges of normality are present everywhere. We are in the society of the teacher-judge, the doctor-judge, the educator-judge, the social worker-judge; it is on them that the universal reign of the normative is based; and each individual, wherever...
Set your goals and along the way learn ride the chaotic waves of the universe without resistance. Its scheduling and course may not be what you hoped for or anticipated, but embrace it anyway with sincere welcoming joy. At the end of the day it will ...
In spite of her desire for a contained universe, her life felt scattered, full of many small moments, without great purpose. That is what she thought, though what is most untrustworthy about our natures and self-worth is how we differe in our own rea...
Increase Mather, President of Harvard University, in his treatise on Remarkable Providences, insists that the smell of herbs alarms the Devil and that medicine expels him. Such beliefs have probably even now not wholly disappeared from among us.
Had they known the difficulties that were to befall them, they might not have been so rash in falling in love. But perhaps there was no way of avoiding it. Fate, karma, the will of the Gods… call it what you like, it was surely meant to happen. Aft...
All parents set out with expectations, hopes and dreams for their child. When a child is diagnosed with a health problem, these aspirations are altered. While one parent is hoping to see their child graduate from university, another is praying that t...
When we meet someone and fall in love, we have a sense that the whole universe is on our side. And yet if something goes wrong, there is nothing left! How is it possible for the beauty that was there only minutes before to vanish so quickly? Life mov...
You can spend all day trying to think of some universal truth to set down on paper, and some poets try that. Shakespeare knew that it's much easier to string together some words beginning with the same letter.
It is merely an accident of history that it is considered normal in our society to believe that the Creator of the universe can hear your thoughts while it is demonstrative of mental illness to believe that he is communicating with you by having the ...