When you consider yourself valuable you will take care of yourself in all ways that are necessary.
Life is a series of problems. Do we want to moan about them or solve them?
There is no act of love that is not an act of work or courage. No exceptions.
The path of spiritual growth is a path of lifelong learning.
Discipline, it has been suggested, is the means of human spiritual evolution. What provides the motive, the energy for discipline? This force I believe to be love. I define love thus: The will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.
Going into the unknown is invariably frightening, but we learn what is significantly new only through adventures.
Although the act of nurturing another’s spiritual growth has the effect of nurturing one’s own, a major characteristic of genuine love is that the distinction between oneself and the other is always maintained and preserved.
The feeling of being valuable is a cornerstone of self-discipline because when you consider yourself valuable you will take care of yourself- including things like using your time well. In this way, self-discipline is self-caring.
As Benjamin Franklin said, ‘Those things that hurt, instruct.’ It is for this reason that wise people learn not to dread but actually to welcome problems and actually to welcome the pain of problems.
Spiritually evolved people, by virtue of their discipline, mastery and love, are people of extraordinary competence, and in their competence they are called on to serve the world, and in their love they answer the call.
I have learned nothing in twenty years that would suggest that evil people can be rapidly influenced by any means other than raw power. They do not respond, at least in the short run, to either gentle kindness or any form of spiritual persuasion with which I am familiar.
The major threats to our survival no longer stem from nature without but from our own human nature within. It is our carelessness, our hostilities, our selfishness and pride and willful ignorance that endanger the world.
The difficulty we have in accepting responsibility for our behavior lies in the desire to avoid the pain of the consequences of that behavior.
It is our task-our essential, central, crucial task-to transform ourselves from mere social creatures into community creatures.
Ultimately love is everything.
The whole course of human history may depend on a change of heart in one solitary and even humble individual – for it is in the solitary mind and soul of the individual that the battle between good and evil is waged and ultimately won or lost.
Discipline is wisdom and vice versa.
Life is difficult. This is the great truth, one of the greatest truths-it is a great truth because once we see this truth, we transcend it.
The only real security in life lies in relishing life’s insecurity.
There is no worse bitterness than to reach the end of your life and realized you have not lived.