When we teach ourselves and our children discipline, we are teaching them and ourselves how to suffer and also how to grow.

I have learned nothing in twenty years that would suggest that evil people can be rapidly influenced by any means other than raw power. They do not respond, at least in the short run, to either gentle kindness or any form of spiritual persuasion with which I am familiar.

The symptoms and the illness are not the same thing. The illness exists long before the symptoms. Rather than being the illness, the symptoms are the beginning of its cure. The fact that they are unwanted makes them all the more a phenomenon of grace — a gift of God, a message from the unconscious.

What people get admired and appreciated for in community are their soft skills: their sense of humor and timing, their ability to listen, their courage and honesty, their capacity for empathy.

Although I was raised in a profoundly secular home, I had a belief, an awareness of God, from as far back as I can remember.

Commitment is inherent in any genuinely loving relationship.

Love is too large, too deep ever to be truly understood or measured or limited within the framework of words.