..there is hope. That's the marvelous thing about being human. We can change our future. We need not be enslaved by the experiences of the past. We can learn to love even when we have not received love.

By nature, most people are controlled by their emotions. They feel sad, so they look sad.

Physician Albert Scheweitzer said. " We are all so much together, but we are all dying of loneliness." Professor Leo Buscaglia notes, "There seems to be accumulating evidence that there is actually an inborn need for this togetherness, this human interaction, this love. It seems that without these close ties with other human beings, a new born infant, for example, can regress developmentally, lose consciousness, fall into idiocy and die.

I cannot change others, but I can influence others... we can't change people, but we can and we do influence people, and we do it every single day.

I wrote this book [ Desperate Marriages] because of my own marriage. My wife and I struggled greatly in the early years of marriage. In spite of the fact that we were Christians before we got married, we prayed about getting married, we believed it was God's will for us to get married, and we still had great struggles.

Physically abusive and verbally abuse marriages are very, very difficult situations. I fully understand people in those kinds of marriages who think there is no hope. I also know that the advice that is given by most people is simply... get out of there as fast as you can.

If you grew up in a dysfunctional family, then there is really no hope for you to have a good relationship. That is another myth that we have to throw off, so that we can get into what I call Reality.