The old idea is that when tragedy strikes or when an obstacle blocks us, there are only two possibilities. We either become a smaller person or we become a bigger person. If it's a real life change you cannot come out the same. So therefore, you're either going to come out smaller or you're going to rise up and ultimately come out of it a bigger person.

The gift within the gift involved the opening of an inner eye that changed how I looked at life.

When a culture simply shrugs about what happens to people in war, it breaks the fragile sequence, the bond between all people.

Trouble is another word for fate; what troubles us the most is what we are fated to one day face. What troubles us in youth will return at each crossroad in life because it secretly seeks to provoke a deep awakening to the unique way that we are intended to live.

Emotions are the natural substances of the soul ... and when we think we can't handle the emotions, we lose the natural substances of the soul and begin looking for substances to replace the flow.

As a culture, we turn away from people just when they are in times of change. That's when most communities used to embrace people, so the individual and the culture both benefited.

There's an African proverb: 'When death finds you, may it find you alive.' Alive means living your own damned life, not the life that your parents wanted, or the life some cultural group or political party wanted, but the life that your own soul wants to live.