Often, instead of offering empathy, we have a strong urge to give advice or reassurance and to explain our own position or feeling.

Every criticism, judgment, diagnosis, and expression of anger is the tragic expression of an unmet need.

Your presence is the most precious gift you can give to another human being.

All violence is the result of people tricking themselves into believing that their pain derives from other people and that consequently those people deserve to be punished.

We are never angry because of what others say or do. It is our thinking that makes us angry.

Instead of playing the game "Making Life Wonderful", we often play the game called "Who's Right". Do you know that game? It's a game where everybody loses.

Empathy is a respectful understanding of what others are experiencing.

People have been trained to criticize, insult, and otherwise communicate in ways that create distance among people.

You don't have to be brilliant. It's enough to become progressively less stupid.

Most of us grew up speaking a language that encourages us to label, compare, demand, and pronounce judgments rather than to be aware of what we are feeling and needing.

The most dangerous of all behaviors may consist of doing things 'because we're supposed to.

We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second.

All good things originate with the Creator God, he'd been taught, and the Song of Life was no exception.

Critics are like eunuchs in a harem: they know how it's done they've seen it done every day but they're unable to do it themselves.

I don't really get too frustrated. I know I'm going to get the ball.

Living on the Gulf Coast, we often have to go through dangerous situations, whether you're a child, an adult or a senior citizen.

When our center is strong, everything else is secondary.

Maintaining joy in God takes 'work'; that is, it's a fight against every impulse for alien joys and every obstacle in the way to seeing and savoring Christ.

For me, the great joy is to watch an audience watching what I've made. To hear not a peep from the audience at the right moment, and then to hear the laughs and the cheers.

I am an actor. I am an artist. I am a daughter. I am a sister. I am a partner. I have a past that some people may not agree with, but it does not define who I am.