Remember, whatever you focus upon, increases...When you focus on the things you need, you'll find those needs increasing. If you concentrate your thoughts on what you don't have, you will soon be concentrating on other things that you had forgotten you don't have-and feel worse! If you set your mind on loss, you are more likely to lose...But a grateful perspective brings happiness and abundance into a person's life.

Before you become too entranced with gorgeous gadgets and mesmerizing video displays, let me remind you that information is not knowledge, knowledge is not wisdom, and wisdom is not foresight. Each grows out of the other, and we need them all.

The liturgy of the Eucharist is best understood as a journey or procession. It is the journey of the Church into the dimension of the Kingdom. We use the word 'dimension' because it seems the best way to indicate the manner of our sacramental entrance into the risen life of Christ. Color transparencies 'come alive' when viewed in three dimensions instead of two. The presence of the added dimension allows us to see much better the actual reality of what has been photographed. In very much the same way, though of course any analogy is condemned to fail, our entrance into the presence of Christ is an entrance into a fourth dimension which allows us to see the ultimate reality of life. It is not an escape from the world, rather it is the arrival at a vantage point from which we can see more deeply into the reality of the world.

Being honest in a relationship is at times exceedingly difficult and painful. Yet the moment a person evades the truth, central fibers of the self pull away and the person initiates a process of deception - a way of manipulating the other person by preventing the person from discovering "real thoughts and real feelings

A disciple: I am worried about human suffering all over the world. What is the solution?Spiritual leader: The solution to our miseries lie within central atom of our being, 'I'. Once this central atom transcends to 'WE', human sufferings can be resolved.

So those who wished for some central cosmic purpose for us, or at least our world, or at least our solar system, or at least our galaxy, have been disappointed, progressively disappointed. The universe is not responsive to our ambitious expectations.

Don't worry about being effective. Just concentrate on being faithful to the truth.

My hands tend to be full enough dealing with people who hate me for who I am. Concentrate too hard on the millions of people who hate you for what you are and you're likely to turn into one of those unkempt, sloppy dressers who sag beneath the weight of the two hundred political buttons they wear pinned to their coats and knapsacks.

The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma.

That sometimes human beings have to just sit in one place and, like, hurt. That you will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do. That there is such a thing as raw, unalloyed, agendaless kindness. That it is possible to fall asleep during an anxiety attack. That concentrating on anything is very hard work.

You should never read just for "enjoyment." Read to make yourself smarter! Less judgmental. More apt to understand your friends' insane behavior, or better yet, your own. Pick "hard books." Ones you have to concentrate on while reading. And for God's sake, don't let me ever hear you say, "I can't read fiction. I only have time for the truth." Fiction is the truth, fool! Ever hear of "literature"? That means fiction, too, stupid.

Predicting the future isn't what you should focus on, hard work is where your concentration should lie, your future will be built even if you don't judge.

X is for X-mas Concentrate your energies, your thoughts and your capital. Put all your eggs in one basket and then watch that basket, then all your Christmases can come at once!

We don't need the victim's entrails for their own sake, only for the sake of the signs they convey. And we don't worship the crow or the raven -- we worship God who communicates by means of them.

I don't blame her, he'd said to me earlier that day, any woman would do the same. I screwed up, I screwed up. I should have been more careful. I don't find it amusing now, but I can imagine that it seems that way to other people, I can imagine that my suffering amuses people. I do so much for them, but they find my suffering amusing. I have to be responsible, though, more discipline, more and more discipline, and if I tried that I would still be married. Not that I blame her, or anyone else, they can do what they want, but I have to be responsible for the world, and none of them know what that feels like. If I don't organize things just right, you see, everything will be destroyed. You understand? I'm not saying I'm God, but I know what it feels like to carry the world. I feel like the little boy with his finder in the dike, like I am doing a small thing, but it takes a lot of concentration. Everything depends on this, I can't even tell you, and I wish I didn't have this burden, this burden that is so much like God's own burden, but given to someone, Doctor, do you see the problem, who does not have the powers of God.

This universe is shot through with mystery. The very fact of its being, and of our own, is a mystery absolute, and the only miracle worthy of the name. The consciousness that animates us is itself central to this mystery and the ground for any experience we might wish to call 'spiritual.' No myths need be embraced for us to commune with the profundity of our circumstance. No personal God need be worshiped for us to live in awe at the beauty and immensity of creation. No tribal fictions need be rehearsed for us to realize, one fine day, that we do, in fact, love our neighbors, that our happiness is inextricable from their own, and that our interdependence demands that people everywhere be given the opportunity to flourish.

The Buddhists or the Jains do not depend upon God; but the whole force of their religion is directed to the great central truth in every religion, to evolve a God out of man. They have not seen the Father, but they have seen the Son. And he that hath seen the Son hath seen the Father also.

O child of God, be more careful to keep the way of the Lord, more concentrated in heart in seeking His glory, and you will see the loving-kindness and the tender mercy of the Lord in your life.

He had no faintest conception till that very hour of how they would look, and even doubted their existence. But when he saw them he knew that he had always known them and realized what part each one of them had played at many an hour in his life when he had supposed himself alone, so that now he could say to them, one by one, not 'Who are you?' but 'So it was you all the time.' All that they were and said at this meeting woke memories. The dim consciousness of friends about him which had haunted his solitudes from infancy was now at last explained; that central music in every pure experience which had always just evaded memory was now at last recovered...He saw not only Them; he saw Him. This animal, this thing begotten in a bed, could look on Him. What is blinding, suffocating fire to you is now cool light to him, is clarity itself, and wears the form of a man.

"Essas duas hist?rias - a do lado de dentro e a do lado de fora - podem ser contadas sobre cada um de n?s. Ao cham?-las de 'hist?rias' n?o pretendo diminu?-las. Algumas s?o, apesar de tudo, verdadeiras. O problema ? que temos muita dificuldade em ver como ambas as hist?rias que contamos sobre n?s podem ser verdadeiras. O efeito da segunda hist?ria, aquela contada do lado de fora, parece uma dr?stica realoca??o do nosso papel na trama. Longe de sermos o personagem principal da hist?ria, estamos reduzidos a um figura??o. A hist?ria do lado de dentro gira ao nosso redor, mas na outra hist?ria cada um de n?s ? apenas um simples personagem em meio a muitos outros, um personagem cuja entrada em cena ? determinada por outras pessoas e que n?o tem nenhum controle real sobre a hora da sua sa?da do palco. As coisas que impulsinam nossas vidas, as coisas que queremos, nossos planos, projetos e metas - aquilo que podemos chamar de nossa motiva??o - s?o o resultado de for?as que n?o controlamos. Aparentemente, nosso papel foi escrito por outra pessoa. Temos pouco controle sobre o seu conte?do e n?o temos a menos ideia de qual ? o seu sentido.

It's a sad day for American Capitalism when a man can't fly a midget on a kite over central park.

The view that the truth is one and undivided, and the same for all men everywhere at all times, whether one finds it in the pronouncements of sacred books, traditional wisdom, the authority of churches, democratic majorities, observation and experiment conducted by qualified experts, or the convictions of simple folks uncorrupted by civilisation---this view, in one form or another, is central to western thought, which stems from Plato and his disciples.

To the untutored sage, the concentration of population was the prolific mother of all evils, moral no less than physical. He argued that food is good, while surfeit kills; that love is good, but lust destroys; and not less dreaded than the pestilence following upon crowded and unsanitary dwellings was the loss of spiritual power inseparable from too close contact with one's fellow-men.

Sitting there on the heather, on our planetary grain, I shrank from the abysses that opened up on every side, and in the future. The silent darkness, the featureless unknown, were more dread than all the terrors that imagination had mustered. Peering, the mind could see nothing sure, nothing in all human experience to be grasped as certain, except uncertainty itself; nothing but obscurity gendered by a thick haze of theories. Man's science was a mere mist of numbers; his philosophy but a fog of words. His very perception of this rocky grain and all its wonders was but a shifting and a lying apparition. Even oneself, that seeming-central fact, was a mere phantom, so deceptive, that the most honest of men must question his own honesty, so insubstantial that he must even doubt his very existence.