If the weeds are pulled out of the garden too soon, the too shallow roots of the plants developing around it get pulled up with the weed also. Time is what is needed before criticism can be useful.
Most spiritual experiences begin with suffering. They begin with groundlessness. They begin when the rug has been pulled out from under us.
The most successful marriages, gay or straight, even if they begin in romantic love, often become friendships. It's the ones that become the friendships that last.
Friendships do not grow up in any carefully tended and contemplated fashion.... They begin haphazard.
I often say we have a lot to learn from men regarding friendships. They tend to be less crazy about their friendships. They don't care if you don't call them back. They don't get hung up on who you're dating. I love men! But I also love women. There is richness in both types of friendships.
I think the key to passion, to zeal, is gratitude. Or to put it another way, the fuel to motivate is gratitude, and gratitude comes by just backing up a little and realizing how much you've sinned against God.
A prayerful life is the key to possessing gratitude. We often take for granted the people who most deserve our gratitude. Let us not wait until it is too late for us to express our gratitude. Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not giving it. If I gratitude be numbered among the serious sins, then gratitude takes its place among the noblest of virtues. To express gratitude is gracious and honorable, to enact gratitude is generous and noble, but to live with gratitude ever in our hearts is to touch heaven.
Now I worry. If people ended up liking me, did I do the job wrong? So I decided they didn't end up liking me - they ended up being able to deal with me.
Perhaps the most delightful friendships are those in which there is much agreement, much disputation, and yet more personal liking.
The idea of someone not liking me or not liking my movie was always easier to deal with than someone really liking it. I don't know why.
Gratitude creates the most wonderful feeling. It can resolve disputes. It can strengthen friendships. And it makes us better men and women.
Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it.
Remember when you were a kid and the boys didn't like the girls? Only sissies liked girls? What I'm trying to tell you is that nothing's changed. You think boys grow out of not liking girls, but we don't grow out of it. We just grow horny. That's the problem. We mix up liking pussy for liking girls. Believe me, one couldn't have less to do with the other.
I like to wake up and just feel gratitude. Gratitude for waking up, for my health, for my kids, for my family. A lot of times in the evening, I'll write down what my goals are for the next day; When I wake up, I look at that list again. I meditate.
For me... I feel like gratitude has really helped me to keep perspective on everything. The gratitude of doing what I get to do. The gratitude for my everyday life. The gratitude for simple things.
Gratitude is the creative force, the mother and father of love. It is in gratitude that real love exists. Love expands only when gratitude is there. Limited love does not offer gratitude. Limited love is immediately bound by something- by constant desires or constant demands. But when it is unlimited love, constant love, then gratitude comes to the fore. This love becomes all gratitude.