“To be fully human has little to do with always being the centre of attention, getting your way and having all your ambitions met. To be fully human is to be like Christ, to 'count others better than yourselves' (Phil 2:13)...It takes rare strength to treat others as more important than yourself.”
“Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider others better than yourselves.”
“I have come to believe that by and large the human family all has the same secrets, which are both very telling and very important to tell. They are telling in the sense that they tell what is perhaps the central paradox of our condition—that what we hunger for perhaps more than anything else is to be known in our full humanness, and yet that is often just what we also fear more than anything else. It is important to tell at least from time to time the secret of who we truly and fully are—even if we tell it only to ourselves—because otherwise we run the risk of losing track of who we truly and fully are and little by little come to accept instead the highly edited version which we put forth in hope that the world will find it more acceptable than the real thing. It is important to tell our secrets too because it makes it easier that way to see where we have been in our lives and where we are going. It also makes it easier for other people to tell us a secret or two of their own, and exchanges like that have a lot to do with what being a family is all about and what being human is all about.”
“No better way to help brighten humanity than uplifting others...especially your friends”
“When you have nothing other than your breath, then you are fully alive.”
“...they are able to forgive themselves, as a wise man once said, for being human. That is knowing that life is hard and virtue rare, they keep the ancient faith that it is better to love than to hate, to live fully even if imperfectly.”