I like to compare the holiday season with the way a child listens to a favorite story. The pleasure is in the familiar way the story begins, the anticipation of familiar turns it takes, the familiar moments of suspense, and the familiar climax and ending.
One of the universal fears of childhood is the fear of not having value in the eyes of the people whom we admire so much.
It’s good to be curious about many things.
The greatest gift you ever give is your honest self.
Transitions are almost always signs of growth, but they can bring feelings of loss. To get somewhere new, we may have to leave somewhere else behind.
Knowing that we can be loved exactly as we are gives us all the best opportunity for growing into the healthiest of people.
Anyone who does anything to help a child in his life is a hero to me.
It’s not the honors and the prizes and the fancy outsides of life which ultimately nourish our souls. It’s the knowing that we can be trusted, that we never have to fear the truth, that the bedrock of our very being is good stuff.
I think everybody longs to be loved and longs to know that he or she is lovable and, consequently, the greatest thing that we can do is to help somebody know that they are loved and capable of loving.
If you could only sense how important you are to the lives of those you meet; how important you can be to the people you may never even dream of. There is something of yourself that you leave at every meeting with another person.
Who we are in the present includes who we were in the past.
It would have been sad for me to spend my life just trying to superimpose stuff on people rather than trying to encourage them to look within themselves for what’s of value.
How many times have you noticed that it’s the little quiet moments in the midst of life that seem to give the rest extra-special meaning?
Play is often talked about as if it were a relief from serious learning. But for children play is serious learning. Play is really the work of childhood.
As human beings, our job in life is to help people realize how rare and valuable each one of us really is, that each of us has something that no one else has-or ever will have-something inside that is unique to all time.
Love isn’t a state of perfect caring. It is an active noun like struggle. To love someone is to strive to accept that person exactly the way he or she is, right here and now.
There are three ways to ultimate success: The first way is to be kind. The second way is to be kind. The third way is to be kind.
What matters in this life is more than winning for ourselves. What really matters is helping others win too. Even if it means slowing down and changing our course now and then.
We live in a world in which we need to share responsibility. It’s easy to say “It’s not my child, not my community, not my world, not my problem.” Then there are those who see the need and respond. I consider those people my heroes.
Vermont is a small state which makes an enormous difference.