Real love is a permanently self-enlarging experience.

Ultimately love is everything.

Until you value yourself, you won't value your time. Until you value your time, you will not do anything with it.

It is only because of problems that we grow mentally and spiritually.

Whenever we seek to avoid the responsibility for our own behavior, we do so by attempting to give that responsibility to some other individual or organization or entity. But this means we then give away our power to that entity.

Problems do not go away. They must be worked through or else they remain, forever a barrier to the growth and development of the spirit.

We know a great deal more about the causes of physical disease than we do about the causes of physical health.

There can be no vulnerability without risk; there can be no community without vulnerability; there can be no peace, and ultimately no life, without community.

You cannot truly listen to anyone and do anything else at the same time.

Share our similarities, celebrate our differences.

We cannot solve life's problems except by solving them.

The whole course of human history may depend on a change of heart in one solitary and even humble individual - for it is in the solitary mind and soul of the individual that the battle between good and evil is waged and ultimately won or lost.

Discipline is wisdom and vice versa.

The difficulty we have in accepting responsibility for our behavior lies in the desire to avoid the pain of the consequences of that behavior.

Real love is a permanently self-enlarging experience.

The great awareness comes slowly, piece by piece. The path of spiritual growth is a path of lifelong learning. The experience of spiritual power is basically a joyful one.

One extends one's limits only by exceeding them.

We cannot let another person into our hearts or minds unless we empty ourselves. We can truly listen to him or truly hear her only out of emptiness.

Until you value yourself, you won’t value your time. Until you value your time, you will not do anything with it.

Share our similarities celebrate our differences.

When I am with a group of human beings committed to hanging in there through both the agony and the joy of community I have a dim sense that I am participating in a phenomenon for which there is only one word....glory.

Community is and must be inclusive. The great enemy of community is exclusivity. Groups that exclude others because they are poor or doubters or divorced or sinners or of some different race or nationality are not communities they are cliques actually defensive bastions against community.

The truth is that our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable unhappy or unfulfilled. For it is only in such moments propelled by our discomfort that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers.

A life of total dedication to the truth also means a life of willingness to be personally challenged.

Nirvana or lasting enlightenment or true spiritual growth can be achieved only through persistent exercise of real love.

Self examination is the key to insight, which is the key to wisdom.

The principal form that the work of love takes is attention. When we love another person we give him or her our attention; we attend to that person's growth.

The path to holiness lies through questioning everything.

The overall purpose of human communication is - or should be - reconciliation. It should ultimately serve to lower or remove the walls of misunderstanding which unduly separate us human beings, one from another.

The path of spiritual growth is a path of lifelong learning.

The key to community is the acceptance, in fact the celebration of our individual and cultural differences. It is also the key to world peace.

You learn from a conglomeration of the incredible past - whatever experience gotten in any way whatsoever.

I've danced one time in my life. It was the most mortifying experience I ever had.

The experience of life consists of the experience which the spirit has of itself in matter and as matter, in mind and as mind, in emotion, as emotion, etc.

My best film composing experience was with Elia Kazan.

Education is a private matter between the person and the world of knowledge and experience, and has little to do with school or college.

A novel should be an experience and convey an emotional truth rather than arguments.

By experience we find out a short way by a long wandering.

The experience of democracy is like the experience of life itself-always changing, infinite in its variety, sometimes turbulent and all the more valuable for having been tested by adversity.

Learning teacheth more in one year than experience in twenty.

Well, the hardest thing to do, as we know from our own experience on 9/11 is protect everything all the time.

The most important training, though, is to experience life as a writer, questioning everything, inventing multiple explanations for everything. If you do that, all the other things will come; if you don't, there's no hope for you.

When I reached adulthood, even now, I could afford to belong to a country club. But I could never belong to a private club because of my experience as a child, because it would isolate me from the whole of humanity.

No one I know of has ever had this experience-where you had to sit and wait and wait for a DNA test to come back just so you can write the last page of the book.

If you live long enough, you'll experience everything.

Actually I'd had a certain amount of experience in Europe in the inter-war period, as a banker, and I was also a member of the Board of Directors of the International Chamber of Commerce.

In the case of my book, I don't think it's really the coming-out gay novel that everyone really needed, even though it was received as such. The boy is too creepy, he betrays his teacher, the only adult man with whom he's enjoyed a sexual experience, etc.

Well, I go to the theater today, and its curtain - there is no curtain in this play; the lights go down and go up - and we start. And I live this character for two hours. There are only two of us in the play. And It's a complete experience.

Our job as writers and thinkers in the time is how to bring about the occasions that let people have that first-person experience - or the metaphoric experience that allows them to see human continuity as opposed to total threat, total willingness to do violence.