If anything diminishes a person, it is the cancer of constant complaining.
Hospitality is the key to new ideas, new friends, new possibilities. What we take into our lives changes us. Without new people and new ideas, we are imprisoned inside ourselves.
Indifference is the acid of life. It erodes all the spirit that’s in us and makes us useless to anyone else. We all have to stand for something, or our souls cease to breathe.
Try saying this silently to everyone and everything you see for thirty days and see what happens to your own soul: I wish you happiness now and whatever will bring happiness to you in the future.
Life is the ability to start over again.
If life is really for the living, then the trick to living well is to learn to live it fully, to soak it up, to revel in it.
Living well has something to do with the spirituality of wholeheartedness, of seeing life more as a grace than as a penance, as time to be lived with eager expectation of its goodness, not in dread of its challenges.
To insist on living until we die may be one of life’s greatest virtues.
Old age tells us that we ourselves have failed often, have never really done anything completely right, have never truly been perfect – anad that is completely all right. We are who we are – and so is everyone else.
Persistence may not solve everything – at least in our lifetime – but it is truer to the meaning of life for us to wait for another plowing, another seeding, another harvest, then not.
In scripture God brings the animals to the human for naming. In that simple act the human is brought to recognize the particular personality and worth of each living creature. Too bad we forget so often.
When I know and accept myself-all my strengths and all my limitations- I am immediately respectful of everyone else because I know they have something beautiful within them that I do not have.
There is a built-in danger in old age which, if we give in to it, makes aging one of the most difficult periods of life, rather than one of the most satisfying – which it should be. Tye danger of old age is that we may start acting old.
Sometimes we exclude things in ourselves in order to be like everybody else around us-our ethnicity, our social backgrounds, our ideas. What kind of world is it that will not allow me to be myself, and is it really good for me to be there? What part of me will die a slow death if I stay?
Religion is pointing toward the moon.
The question is not, do we go to church; the question is, have we been converted. The crux of Christianity is not whether or not we give donations to popular charities but whether or not we are really committed to the poor.
Anger is not bad. Anger can be a very positive thing, the thing that moves us beyond the acceptance of evil.
Life always comes out of death. The present rises from the ashes of the past. The future is always possible for those who are willing to re-create it.
We need a much broader conversation on what the morality of pro-life is.
Beware of your definition of success: If it has more to do with what other people think of you than it does with what you know of your own abilities, you may be confusing applause with achievement.