Personal writing takes up where public education leaves off – with intent to know what is important about life.

Expressing doubt is how we begin a journey to discover essential truths.

We bring happiness into the world one day at a time by accepting pain and returning understanding and compassion.

Life goes on without regard to our whims. What we make of life is what counts, how we address the challenges in our lives determines our respective levels of personal accomplishment and happiness.

The only recourse for an escape artist from world affairs is to explore their inner sanctum where hopes, dreams, insecurities, and despair collide.

Hope is a form of conscious dream making

Hope is a form of conscious dream making.

A person tied to the world of sorrows can return to nature for inspiration. Nature provides solace to troubled hearts.

Life introduces us to the gentle, cosmic rhythms of an extraneous world. What is objective truth might exceed human capacity to ever fully perceive, comprehend, and explain.

Parents’ transmit their attitude towards education to children via soundless, aphonic messages.

The emotional ingredients that sustain long-term relationships are kindness, thoughtfulness, and compassion.

Why should self-indulgent nonsense - whatever its professed political orientation - be lauded as the height of scholarly achievement?

We are sitting on many powder kegs. Whether it's Ferguson, or St Louis, or like the other night, or Baltimore. Or different parts of Chicago.

One of the marks of a great poet is that he creates his own family of words and teaches them to live together in harmony and to help one another.

My degrees are in anthropology, and I have friends who have worked with apes.

Laughter or crying is what a human being does when there's nothing else he can do.

We may not know how to forgive, and we may not want to forgive; but the very fact we say we are willing to forgive begins the healing practice.

I still do have the little lunch bag that my mother made out of a towel and embroidered with my name on it for when I went to kindergarten.

The essential tendency of life is toward happiness . . . . Optimism is the only true condition for a reasonable man.

The problem for me is that I look like so many people in my family, so I can't really see anything. Except I could say that I look rather like my father without his mustache.

I have ignored my health for years, but recent developments have forced me to re-evaluate my priorities of faith and family.