Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest accomplishment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around.
Time has no meaning in itself unless we choose to give it significance
If you're an advocate of gentleness, you're simplistic and naive. If you're an advocate of despair and hate, you're sophisticated.
I have been a teacher myself all my life. I have an intense passion to share with people. Our only salvation is in knowledge, in learning.
I have a very strong feeling that the opposite of love is not hate - it's apathy. It's not giving a damn.
My mother made soft polenta often, and as a child, I would watch her stir until she looked like her arm would fall off.
The purpose of life is to help others, and if you can't help them, won't you at least not hurt them? I know that is a platitude, that that is sentimental and can easily be attacked. But loving, caring is simple, and we make it complex. Our own neuroses make it complex.
I believe that you control your destiny, that you can be what you want to be. You can also stop and say, 'No, I won't do it, I won't behave his way anymore. I'm lonely and I need people around me, maybe I have to change my methods of behaving,' and then you do it.
Biologically and physiologically, we are not equal. Some of us learn better at different times of day. Some learn best visually, some auditorially, some tactilely, by touching.
I've spoken in every state in the union, meeting and hugging the people who later bought my books. I spoke to anybody who wanted to hear me, including 1,000 nuns who could pay me only with homemade bread.
Don't brood. Get on with living and loving. You don't have forever.
You can be a follower of Muhammad or Jesus or Buddha or whomever. Always, they said that the most essential factor is to love your neighbor. And to love you.
We want to gently remind people that we don't have forever. In my work, I hear parents complain all the time that their children grow up so fast. But they don't take the time to sit down and talk to each other. The last bastion of getting together is around the table.
It is paradoxical that many educators and parents still differentiate between a time for learning and a time for play without seeing the vital connection between them.
Food is celebratory. People who don't cook don't know how much fun they're missing.
I got the copyright for love!
Only the weak are cruel. Gentleness can only be expected from the strong.
Love always creates, it never destroys. In this lies man's only promise.
Change is the end result of all true learning.
I am a teacher. And I think I am a serious one who happens to be enjoying life.