Prophets are those who take life as it is and expand it. They refuse to shrink a vision of tomorrow to the boundaries of yesterday.

Real failure comes when we consider ourselves good enough at something to be able to repeat it rather than to develop it. "Success is dangerous," the painter Pablo Picasso said. "One begins to copy oneself, and to copy oneself is more dangerous than to copy others. It leads to sterility."

Everything we do seeds the future. No action is an empty one.

Prophets are so dangerous because they cry in season and out of season, politely and impolitely, loud and long.

For centuries the church has confronted the human community with role models of greatness. We call them saints when what we really often mean to say is 'icon,' 'star,' 'hero,' ones so possessed by an internal vision of divine goodness that they give us a glimpse of the face of God in the center of the human. They give us a taste of the possibilities of greatness in ourselves.

It is a pathetic moment in the history of the human condition when the outside world tells us who and what we are - and we start to believe it ourselves. Then, bent over from the weight of the negativity, we start to wither on the outside.

Try saying this silently to everyone and everything you see for thirty days and see what happens to your own soul: I wish you happiness now and whatever will bring happiness to you in the future.