Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
A life of total dedication to the truth also means a life of willingness to be personally challenged.
Sickness begets chaos, which, through hard work and a touch of grace, leads to growth and resurrection.
The act of loving is an act of self-evolution even when the purpose of the act is someone else's growth.
Love is too large, too deep ever to be truly understood or measured or limited within the framework of words.
We know a great deal more about the causes of physical disease than we do about the causes of physical health.
Until you value yourself, you won't value your time. Until you value your time, you will not do anything with it.
God wants us to become himself or herself or itself. We are growing toward Godhood. God is the goal of evolution.
Going into the unknown is invariably frightening, but we learn what is significantly new only through adventures.
Falling in love is not an extension of one's limits or boundaries; it is a partial and temporary collapse of them.
We are most often in the dark when we are the most certain, and the most enlightened when we are the most confused.
I define love thus: The will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth.
By far the most important form of attention we can give our loved ones is listening... True listening is love in action.
I've had all kinds of experiences with God in terms of revelation through a still, small voice or dreams or coincidences.
The will to grow is, in essence, the same phenomenon as love. Genuinely loving people are, by definition, growing people.
Problems are the cutting edge that distinguishes between success and failure. Problems ... create our courage and wisdom.
When we teach ourselves and our children discipline, we are teaching them and ourselves how to suffer and also how to grow.
But for the first time, I had a religious identity. I had come home. And so I called myself a Zen Buddhist at the age of 18.
Although I was raised in a profoundly secular home, I had a belief, an awareness of God, from as far back as I can remember.
A significant regret is that I was not as good a father as I would have ideally liked to be. I was not, I think, a bad father.
It is our task-our essential, central, crucial task-to transform ourselves from mere social creatures into community creatures.
The feeling of being valuable - 'I am a valuable person'- is essential to mental health and is a cornerstone of self-discipline.
We must be willing to fail and to appreciate the truth that often "Life is not a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be lived.
If we know exactly where we're going, exactly how to get there, and exactly what we'll see along the way, we won't learn anything.
When we avoid the legitimate suffering that results from dealing with problems, we also avoid the growth that problems demand from us.
Problems do not go away. They must be worked through or else they remain, forever a barrier to the growth and development of the spirit.
If we seek to be loved - if we expect to be loved - this cannot be accomplished; we will be dependent and grasping not genuinely loving.
The best decision-makers are those who are willing to suffer the most over their decisions but still retain their ability to be decisive.
If your goal is to avoid pain and escape suffering, I would not advise you to seek higher levels of consciousness or spiritual evolution.
I believe it would be considerably healthier for us to dare to live without a reason for many things than with reasons that are simplistic.
As far as I am concerned, virtually all psychological diseases have their origin in our conscious minds. And that is not what we are taught.
If we want to be heard we must speak in a language the listener can understand and on a level at which the listener is capable of operating.
The key to community is the acceptance, in fact the celebration of our individual and cultural differences. It is also the key to world peace
The difficulty we have in accepting responsibility for our behavior lies in the desire to avoid the pain of the consequences of that behavior.
Multiple personality disorder and possession are not necessarily mutually incompatible disorders. There's some evidence that you can have both.
Life is difficult. This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths. It is a great truth because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it.
If you wish to discern either the presence or absence of integrity, you need to ask only one question. What is missing? Has anything been left out?
The more effort we make to appreciate and perceive reality, the larger and more accurate our maps will be. But many do not want to make this effort.
We cannot let another person into our hearts or minds unless we empty ourselves. We can truly listen to him or truly hear her only out of emptiness.
When we love something it is of value to us, and when something is of value to us we spend time with it, time enjoying it and time taking care of it.
I've gone to great lengths not to be a guru. I think the notion of guruhood is utterly pathological, and I couldn't live that way. I am just a person.
The quickest way to change your attitude toward pain is to accept the fact that everything that happens to us has been designed for our spiritual growth.
But I already saw no great difference between the psyche and spirituality. To amass knowledge without becoming wise is not my idea of progress in therapy.
We cannot even let the other person into our hearts or minds unless we empty ourselves. We can truly listen to him or truly hear her only out of emptiness.
The principal form that the work of love takes is attention. When we love another person we give him or her our attention; we attend to that person's growth.
There can be no vulnerability without risk; there can be no community without vulnerability; there can be no peace, and ultimately no life, without community.
I never thought I would ever be middle-of-the-road anything, much less a middle-of-the-road Christian, but it actually ended up I'm extremely middle of the road.
Human beings are poor examiners, subject to superstition, bias, prejudice, and a PROFOUND tendency to see what they want to see rather than what is really there.
Love is the free exercise of choice. Two people love each other only when they are quite capable of living without each other but choose to live with each other.
God creates each soul differently, so that when all the mud is finally cleared away, His light will shine through it in a beautiful, colorful, totally new pattern.
The great awareness comes slowly, piece by piece. The path of spiritual growth is a path of lifelong learning. The experience of spiritual power is basically a joyful one.