“A mature person reaps joy in the commonplace acts of living, appreciates the serenity of just being, while balancing the responsibilities that come naturally about when deeply immersed in family and community affairs. Directing their attention outward, assisting other people in their troubled times, while denying themselves the indulgence of self-absorption frees a person’s bidding mind from a jumble of discordant thoughts, wants, and unholy bequests.”
“I came on earth for something, I must do something, and I must live and leave not just anything, but something!”
“My default button was set to self-destruct. It had been since birth.”
“To become different from what we are, we must have some awareness of what we are.”
“There is no pre-mapped intellectual topology path leading to truth. Truth is a process of conducting a searching investigatory dialogue with oneself in an attempt to examine and discern the contents of a person’s own mind. Every person must ask himself or herself what is essential in life.”
“Lies, greed, pettiness, and ugly emotions ensnare a person. We are free people whom construct our own cages that we allow to suppress our vital instinct to live a wholesome life. Truth telling demands an awareness of what sins cage a person in. Truthfulness also commands that a person fess up to the role that he or she played in scripting unpleasant scenes in a tarnished personal history.”
“Self-mastery involves a studious account of all aspects of human life and developing a comprehensive philosophy for living without fear or anxiety throughout the remaining years of a person’s life. A person must live within the limits of the human condition, which does not justify giving into all of our destructive impulses or living a pleasurable and guiltless life. Self-mastery does not require a person to live a life without passion; rather, it entails channeling vibrant personal passions into living in a virtuous manner of created beings.”
“Those who seek to listen to their own inner voice forget to listen to the judgment of others.”
“My spirit is stronger.”
“Biological instincts are the key to understanding how every single human being is wired. The marvelous interplay of various brain circuits creates our instinctual reality of the daily life. If you’re conscious about the fact that there lies a complex yet vividly beautiful brain circuit mechanism behind every single impulse of your daily emotions, then you can choose how to react upon each of those impulses. You can thus program your behavioral response in a certain situation.”
“Self worth is not measured by what you have, no matter how full your life is. Rather, it comes from what you are, how authentically you re really living your life, and how much you are willing to give to something other than your own insecurities.”
“She believes that everyone we meet influences us, that we need to hear their stories to learn more about ourselves.”
“Possibly the apparent relapse they had suffered was not a fall and a cause for suffering, but a leap forward and a positive act.”
“Fly free spirits fly, for if you reach heaven before me, then at least I know to this world I have more love to apply. ~ Roy Hale”
“Everyone had learned that it was worth giving up privacy for the merest possibility of fame, and the idea that only a private self was truly autonomous and free had be lost in the static of the airwaves.”
“This was what Dennis had been doing lately: granting everyone permission to feel the way they were going to feel regardless. It was the books. Dennis’s relationship to his own feelings had become tender, curatorial. Dismantling. Entomological. Mave couldn’t be like that. She treated her emotional life the way she treated her car: She let it go, let it tough it out. To friends she said things like “I know you’re thinking this looks like a ’79, but it’s really an ’87.” She finally didn’t care to understand all that much about her emotional life; she just went ahead and did it. The point, she thought, was to attend the meager theater of it, quietly, and not stand up in the middle and shout, “Oh, my God, you can see the crew backstage!” There was a point at which the study of something became a frightening and naive thing.”
“-Mie ar trebui să îmi fie rușine, îl informă el pe un porumbel cocoțat pe marginea ferestrei. Stau aici, făcând ceea ce critic, cu gândurile Dumnezeu știe unde, trăind prea mult în imaginație.”