Our lives improve only when we take chances.

It is your choices that make you uniquely you.

You must take chances. If you do nothing, you reduce the possibilities you have for greater joy.

We're never so vulnerable than when we trust someone-but paradoxically, if we cannot trust, neither can we find love or joy.

The most sincere compliment we can pay is attention.

How many human beings anywhere, hold on to a relationship merely because it exists? This fear of loneliness, abandonment, or failure can, if we let it, hold any of us back from doing exactly what each of us needs to do to feel fulfilled.

At 10 minutes to seven on a dark, cool evening in Mexico City in 1968, John Stephen Akwari of Tanzania painfully hobbled into the Olympic Stadium-the last man to finish the marathon. The winner had already been crowned, and the victory ceremony was long finished. So the stadium was almost empty and Akwari - alone, his leg bloody and bandaged - struggled to circle the track to the finish line. When asked why he had continued the grueling struggle, the young man from Tanzania answered softly: My country did not send me 9,000 miles to start the race. They sent me 9,000 miles to finish the race.