“Even water carves monuments of stone, so do our thoughts shape our character.”

“We stone our prophets, then build monuments to them after they're gone.”

“Oh, he was just angry, we tell ourselves when someone blurts out something he later apologizes for. But a word, once spoken, lingers forever; to keep peace we pretend to forget, but we never do. Strange that a spoken word can have such lasting power when words carved on stone monuments vanish in spite of all our efforts to preserve them. What we would lose persists, lodged in our minds, and what we would keep is lost to water, moths, moss.”

“If we fail to realize our full potential as human beings, we live more on an animalistic level. This is fine for dogs, cats, and chimpanzees but doesn’t work quite so well for women and men. Without the capacity to freely shape our own lives, much as a sculptor might carve stone, we inevitably slip into negativity and depression.”

“The decisions we make and the way we behave are what ultimately shape our character. Charles A. Hall aptly described that process in these lines: "We sow our thoughts, and we reap our actions; we sow our actions, and we reap our habits; we sow our habits, and we reap our characters; we sow our characters, and we reap our destiny”

“It is hard for fish to be aware of water. It is hard for us to notice something that's an ingrained pattern shaping our habitual thought.”