Books are like people: fascinating, inspiring, thought-provoking, some laugh, some meditate, others ache with old age, but still have wisdom: some are disease-ridden, some deceitful; but others are a delight to behold, and many travel to foreign lands; some cry, some teach, others are lots of fun, they are excellent companions and all have individuality - Books are friends. What person has too many friends?

Sometimes you're trying so hard to get your life together and still it's not enough, everything is falling apart. What to do, you're asking. Just keep going through hell for yourself, not for everyone else. Richer with that wisdom, I will build my happiness from nothing. I will rise from the dust. And I will do it on my own. I will live for myself and I won’t look at the others.

Maybe sheetrocking wasn't one of Sully's favorite jobs, but like most physical labor, there was a rhythm to it that you could find if you cared to look, and once you found this rhythm it'd get you through a morning. Rhythm was what Sully had counted on over the long years - that and the wisdom to understand that no job, no matter how thankless or stupid or backbreaking, could not be gotten through. The clock moved if you let it.

How do you know if your inner voice or sense of guidance is your deeper-self speaking its wisdom, your unconscious childhood programming, or the voice of your Aunt Matilda? Discerning the difference between an automatic response stemming from family beliefs, childhood distortions, or culture, and guidance from our connection with our higher/deeper self, makes life, success, and relationships so much easier.

To you who are parents, I say, show love to your children. You know you love them, but make certain they know it as well. They are so precious. Let them know. Call upon our Heavenly Father for help as you care for their needs each day and as you deal with the challenges which inevitably come with parenthood. You need more than your own wisdom in rearing them.

The study of law can be disappointing at times, a matter of applying narrow rules and arcane procedure to an uncooperative reality; a sort of glorified accounting that serves to regulate the affairs of those who have power--and that all too often seeks to explain, to those who do not, the ultimate wisdom and justness of their condition.But that's not all the law is. The law is also memory; the law also records a long-running conversation, a nation arguing with its conscience.

God isn't the son of Memory; He's the son of Immediate Experience. You can't worship a spirit in spirit, unless you do it now. Wallowing in the past may be good literature. As wisdom, it's hopeless. Time Regained is Paradise Lost, and Time Lost is Paradise Regained. Let the dead bury their dead. If you want to live at every moment as it presents itself, you've got to die to every other moment.

We’ve bought into the idea that education is about training and “success”, defined monetarily, rather than learning to think critically and to challenge. We should not forget that the true purpose of education is to make minds, not careers. A culture that does not grasp the vital interplay between morality and power, which mistakes management techniques for wisdom, which fails to understand that the measure of a civilization is its compassion, not its speed or ability to consume, condemns itself to death.

We know that for mankind to move forward, changes must be made. However, if an old man is wise only by his gray hair, yet it is inevitable that this wisdom will also become impaired by age, then it can be deduced that we cannot expect the very old or very young to make progressive strides to better society, it must be up to the men and women still in the prime of their lives to re-learn and teach the changes needed to be made.

How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?" (Plato) The things we want are transformative, and we don’t know or only think we know what is on the other side of that transformation. Love, wisdom, grace, inspiration- how do you go about finding these things that are in some ways about extending the boundaries of the self into unknown territory, about becoming someone else?