No consciousness that we would recognize as consciousness. Not awareness, as far as we can make out, of a self with a history. What I mind is what tends to come next. They have no consciousness therefore. Therefore what? Therefore we are free to use ...
It is not by regretting what is irreparable that true work is to be done, but by making the best of what we are. It is not by complaining that we have not the right tools, but by using well the tools we have. What we are, and where we are is God's pr...
Why is it we must suffer the loss of something so dear before we realize what a treasure we had? Why must the sun be darkened before we feel how genuinely impossible it is to live without its warmth? Why within the misery of absence does love grow by...
Will God ever ask you to do something you are not able to do? The answer is yes--all the time! It must be that way, for God's glory and kingdom. If we function according to our ability alone, we get the glory; if we function according to the power of...
When Dawn looked at Vic, she saw Vic exactly as he wanted to be seen. Whereas Vic's parents couldn't help seeing who he used to be, and so many friends and strangers couldn't help seeing who he didn't want to be anymore, Dawn only saw him. Call it a ...
Nearly all our older poetry was written and read by men to whom the distinction between poetry and rhetoric, in its modern form, would have been meaningless. The 'beauties' which they chiefly regarded in every composition were those which we either d...
But Andrew was right about one thing. Human beings need to tell stories. Historically, it's the quickest way we have for transmitting useful information to other members of our species. Stories are not simply nice things to have; they are essential s...
The decisions we make lead us to complex behavioral sets, and what we decide to do can be consciously and unconsciously motivated. The human being, however, is a small-group decision-making animal, a small pack animal, with a will to life, who engage...
Everything we get, outside of the free gifts of nature, must in some way be paid for. The world is full of so- called economists who in turn are full of schemes for getting something for nothing. They tell us that the government can spend and spend w...
At times the whole world seems to be in conspiracy to importune you with emphatic trifles. Friend, client, child, sickness, fear, want, charity, all knock at once at thy closet door and say,—'Come out unto us.' But keep thy state; come not into the...
Let's think of that moment when a woman washed the feet of Jesus with the nard, so expensive: it is a religious moment, a moment of gratitude, a moment of love. And he [Judas] stands apart with bitter criticism: 'But this could have been used for the...
...there is no real advance in human reason, for what we gain in one direction we lose in another; for all minds start from the same point, and as the time spent in learning what others have thought is so much time lost in learning to think for ourse...
A farm regulated to production of raw commodities is not a farm at all. It is a temporary blip until the land is used up, the water polluted, the neighbors nauseated, and the air unbreathable. The farmhouse, the concrete, the machinery, and outbuildi...
When our will is strong and aligned with Divine intent, there is nothing we cannot do or be. With power and guidance flowing through us, Life becomes an effortless dance as we relinquish control and limitation and allow our Spirit Within to express i...
They said growing up was watching your breasts grow, your waist widen and hairs sprout on your erogenous ones. You became aware of the warmness that spread in circles in your stomach when that fine boy smiled at you. But that was not growing to me. G...
With the rising cost of food, either the portions get smaller, or the quality gets inferior. So, for example, pizza that used to taste like cardboard now tastes like carpet. Unvacuumed carpet, because I asked for lots of toppings.
Literature keeps presenting the most vicious things to us an entertainment, but what it appeals to is not any pleasure of these things, but the exhilaration of standing apart from them and being able to see them for what they are because they aren't ...
Now I realized that life supplies us with everything we need for the journey. Everything I had acquired either actively or passively, everything I had learned either voluntarily or by osmosis, was coming back to me as the real riches of my life, even...
Things that seem too common: too many furnishings where one is sitting; too many brushes around an inkstone; too many Buddhas in a home chapel; too many stones and trees and bushes in a garden courtyard; too many children and grandchildren in a house...
In these countless stars, in their clusters and colors and constellations, in the “shooting” showers of blazing dust and ice, we have always found beauty. And in this beauty, the overwhelming size of the universe has seemed less ominous, earth’...
How quickly self rises to the surface, and the instrument is ready to believe he is something more than an instrument! How sadly easy it is to make of the very service God entrusts us with a pedestal on which to display ourselves. But God will not sh...
