Interestingly, anger and lust are also elusive states once they have passed. Trying to recall why you were angry about something when you've calmed down is like trying to remember why you were in love with someone who no longer attracts you: the initial impulse triggering the emotion is impossible to recapture.

Interestingly, anger and lust are also elusive states once they have passed. Trying to recall why you were angry about something when you've calmed down is like trying to remember why you were in love with someone who no longer attracts you: the initial impulse triggering the emotion is impossible to recapture.

Most cooks would not, for example, prepare an important, elaborate, and difficult dish on the back-burner. Neither should we relegate the cultivation and preparation of happiness for a position where it is both hard to reach and difficult to infuse with new ingredients.

If you know you can do it - if you can already chart every day in your future - then why bother? Choose to do something you have more trouble imagining. Take a chance.

Confessions are like tattoos in that 1) You convince yourself that the immediate pain of going through the process means it won't bother you later on; 2) They are permanent.

Anger can offer a sense of indignity to replace a sense of shame, and offer a voice-raised above others-which can finally be heard. Those voices are most effective when they are raised in unison, when they have mercy as well as anger behind them, and when, instead of roaring at the anger of old pain, they sing about the glorious possibilities of a future where anger has a smaller house than hope.

...there is a celebrated aphorism insisting that the best way to live is to 'work like you don't need the money, dance like nobody is watching, and love like you've never been hurt.'...After years of hearing and reading these lines I have decided to tell the truth: the original version is wrong. There is a grave error in the wording of this adage. The correct version should go as follows: Love like you don't need the money, Work like nobody is watching, Dance like you've never been hurt. See? Doesn't that make more sense?