That Is Life. Quotes

People of excellence go the extra mile to do what's right.

Reading, conversation, environment, culture, heroes, mentors, nature – all are lottery tickets for creativity. Scratch away at them and you’ll find out how big a prize you’ve won.

You can spread jelly on the peanut butter but you can't spread peanut butter on the jelly.

Pretentiousness repels but authenticity attracts, and vulnerability is the pathway to intimacy.

To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.

Vipassana meditation is an ongoing creative purification process. Observation of the moment-to-moment experience cleanses the mental layers, one after another.

If you need something from somebody always give that person a way to hand it to you.

It may help us, in those times of trouble, to remember that love is not only about relationship, it is also an affair of the soul.

Now and then we had a hope that if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates.

Some people are so addicted to their misery that they will destroy anything that gets in the way of their fix.

Congress and state legislatures should not tell teachers how to teach, any more than they should tell surgeons how to perform operations.

There are those who say that seeing is believing. I am telling you that believing is seeing.

Where I'm from, we believe in all sorts of things that aren't true... we call it history.

Stories have to be told or they die, and when they die, we can't remember who we are or why we're here.

Rather than being your thoughts and emotions, be the awareness behind them.

The only real fall of man is his noneucharistic life in a noneucharistic world.

I learned a long time ago that there is something worse than missing the goal, and that's not pulling the trigger.

All cruelty springs from weakness.

I like it when my mother smiles. And I especially like it when I make her smile.

Closure is just as delusive-it is the false hope that we can deaden our living grief.

Did not one spend the first half of one's days in dreams of happiness and the second half in regrets and terrors?

Skeptics always want miracles such as stepping down from the Cross, but never the greater miracle of forgiveness.

But the kind of love that God created and demonstrated is a costly one because it involves sacrifice and presence. It's a love that operates more like a sign language than being spoken outright.

Nothing ever happens in the world that does not happen first inside human hearts.

I try not to speak about all the charities and people I help, because I believe we can only be truly generous when we expect nothing in return.

Love doesn't demand perfection, but it does ask you to give yourself with less reserve than you'd prefer.

When I was growing up we didn't have a massive house and there were five women running around, so my dad and I had to stick together!

We pray for the big things and forget to give thanks for the ordinary, small (and yet really not small) gifts.

To be oneself, simply oneself, is so amazing and utterly unique an experience that it's hard to convince oneself so singular a thing happens to everybody.

Some sessions are stars and some sessions are stones, but in the end they are all rocks and we build upon them.

It's never too late to have a happy childhood.

Even if times are tough and you're enduring a terrible heartache, it's important to focus your anger on a vibrator, not another person.

The boundary to what we can accept is the boundary to our freedom.

One can never consent to creep when one feels an impulse to soar.

I didn't know the answers, but I could feel that the things that gave life meaning came from a place within and from the nurturing of values like tolerance, charity, and community.

I must first have the sense of God's possession of me before I can have the sense of His presence with me.

Avoid loud and aggressive persons, they are vexations to the spirit.

We are so scared of being judged that we look for every excuse to procrastinate.

Death is someone you see very clearly with eyes in the center of your heart: eyes that see not by reacting to light, but by reacting to a kind of a chill from within the marrow of your own life.

Misery loves another idiot with a jukebox where his soul should be.

Who we are in the present includes who we were in the past.

No one can grant you happiness. Happiness is a choice we all have the power to make.

Reading is like travel, allowing you to exit your own life for a bit, and to come back with a renewed, even inspired, perspective.

We are the masters of our reality.

Tragic heroes are failed pragmatists. Their ends are unrealistic and their means are impractical.

Without forgetting it is quite impossible to live at all.

When we fail we are merely joining the great parade of humanity that has walked ahead of us and will follow after us.

It's not what you eat that will kill you as much as what is eating you.

I am quite sure I am more afraid of people who are themselves terrified of the devil than I am of the devil himself.

After years of having a dog, you know him. You know the meaning of his snuffs and grunts and barks. Every twitch of the ears is a question or statement, every wag of the tail is an exclamation.