Hope gives us the courage to confront our circumstances and the capacity to surmount them.

I had learned that every patient has the right to hope, despite long odds, and it was my role to help nurture that hope.

False hope can lead to intemperate choices and flawed decision making. True hope takes into account the real threats that exist and seeks to navigate the best path around them.

Hope can be imagined as a domino effect, a chain reaction, each increment making the next increase more feasible... There are moments of fear and doubt that can deflate it.

There is an authentic biology of hope. Belief and expectation - the key elements of hope - can block pain by releasing the brain's endorphins and enkephalins, mimicking the effects of morphine.

Hope is the elevating feeling we experience when we see - in the mind's eye - a path to a better future.

True hope is cleareyed. It sees all the difficulties that exist and all the potential for failure, but through that carves a realistic path to a better future.

Even when there is no longer hope for the body, there is always hope for the soul.

On average, physicians interrupt patients within eighteen seconds of when they begin telling their story.

Hope differs from optimism. Hope does not arise from being told to "think positively," or from hearing an overly rosy forecast. Hope, unlike optimism, is rooted in unalloyed reality.

Hope, true hope, has proved as important as any medication I might prescribe or any procedure I might perform.

No sane person resists the smell of the soil when sprinkled with water, Especially the smell of the intercourse between earth and rain.

If you want something done ask a busy person to do it. The more things you do the more you can do.

The more you know the less the better.

President Bush left for Canada today to attend a trade summit. Reportedly, the trade summit got off to an awkward start when the president pulled out his baseball cards.

I had this sense that I was part of, sort of a lineage of artists and writers through history that have had mood disorders.

A low view of law always produces legalism; a high view of law makes a person a seeker after grace.

The brave forget. It is those who fought less bravely, or those who fought without justice and live in fear of their victory, who forget the least.

The only idea they have ever manifested as to what is a government of consent, is this - that it is one to which everybody must consent, or be shot.

Learned behaviors have replaced the biologically given ones.

If you enter the dark side of life, and come through it, you emerge with more strength and passion.