Bad artists ignore the darkness of human existence. Good artists often get stuck there. Great artists embrace the full catastrophe of our condition and find beyond it an even deeper truth of peace, healing, and redemption.

Loneliness is proof that your innate search for connection is intact.

The only map of your right life is written on your soul at its most peaceful, and the only sure compass is your heart at its most open.

Anger elicits anger, fear elicits fear, no matter how well meaning we may be.

Don't expect the future to look like the past. Clear away expectations, and let yourself picture a wild, grand new world.

Your body is free but your heart is in prison. To release your heart, you simply reverse the process which locked it up. First you begin to listen for messages from your heart-messages you may have been ignoring since childhood. Next you must take the daring, risky step of expressing your heart in the outside world. . . . As you learn to live by heart, every choice you make will become another way of telling your story. . . . It is the way you were meant to exist. If you stop to listen, you'll realize that your heart has been telling you so all along.

The end goal of all of this striving is to live joyfully, and that there are often more direct ways of achieving this than conforming to rigid standards set by social custom.