The French have a term for this brazenness: je m’en foutisme, the brave art of not giving a damn.

joy is not just about being happy. Joy is a rigorous spiritual practice of saying yes to life on life’s terms,

joy is not just about being happy. Joy is a rigorous spiritual practice of saying yes to life on life’s terms

As one widow put it to me, “Strength doesn’t mean being able to stand up to anything, but being able to crawl on your belly a long, long time before you can stand up again.

You have to be alive in order to live.

If the spirit lusts against the flesh, work so that you can gain the victory over the flesh

You are better than your past, greater than your present, and brighter than your future.

Love the people who love you back.

There are two sides of corruption: 1. Those who feel and see the corruption because they are the victim of it 2. Those who pretend there is no corruption because they are profiting from it.

Man has the right . . . to play as he will . . . to think what he will: to speak what he will: to write what he will: to draw, paint, carve, etch, mould, build as he will: to dress as he will.

If a man is right, he can't be too radical; if he is wrong, he can't be too conservative.

I once asked a hermit in Italy how he could venture to live alone, in a single cottage, on the top of a mountain, a mile from any habitation? He replied, that Providence was his next-door neighbor.

When you stop to examine the way in which our words are formed and uttered, our sentences are hard-put to it to survive the disaster of their slobbery origins.

Passive resistance is a method of securing rights by personal suffering; it is the reverse of resistance by arms.