“Only a rebuke that 'has something in it' will sting, will have the power to stir our feelings, not the other sort, as we know.”
“How easy it is to blame others for our unhappiness, but we are only unhappy when something other than Christ has become our life.”
“To believe that someone else is responsible for your emotional state is to give them a sort of psychic power over you they do not have...we really do generate our own feelings. No one else can do it for us. We respond and are responsible. To think other people are responsible for our feelings is to inhabit a billiard ball, inanimate universe.”
“We have been cut off from our souls in the West, and because romantic love has become our religion, we think we can find fulfillment through this extraordinary and powerful force that draws us into an illusion of permanence. Passion makes us feel alive, makes us sing, makes us feel in touch with something powerful and wonderful, just as it would if we followed this meaning in life in a more spiritual practice. In the West it is often through such relationships, through another human being, that we search desperately for something, not knowing it is to be found within ourselves.”
“If we never have headaches through rebuking our children, we shall have plenty of heartaches when they grow up.”
“If others tell us something we make assumptions, and if they don't tell us something we make assumptions to fulfill our need to know and to replace the need to communicate. Even if we hear something and we don't understand we make assumptions about what it means and then believe the assumptions. We make all sorts of assumptions because we don't have the courage to ask questions.”